Led by Rundensteiner as principal investigator (PI) and co-PI Kelsey Briggs, director of programs and strategic initiatives for data science, the summer experience built on the previous eight years of research programs from summer in data science for undergraduates. The program also reflected WPI’s long history of work on topics ranging from machine learning and deep learning to generative modeling.
From left to right: Pegah Emdad, Gavin Butts and Jethro Lee
Students worked in teams supervised by WPI academic advisors Fabricio Murai, Chun Kit Ngan, Ziming Zhangand Rundensteiner, as well as graduate students of faculty advisors, on authentic research topics. A diverse group of undergraduate students was chosen for the program through an application process including an essay. Those accepted received on-campus housing, a stipend, and reimbursement for travel expenses.
“I have long wanted to do research and am particularly passionate about studying Parkinson’s disease and neurogenerative disorders,” says Olivia Liau, a member of the University of Southern California Class of 2027 who worked on a project using machine learning. make predictions on genomic datasets based on gene expression. “Our project and our results were really cool. I learned so much about working with data.
In addition to conducting research, students met with industry speakers from WPI’s Executive Advisory Board for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to learn about career paths in startups, large companies medium and large companies. Some students also prepare manuscripts of their research for publication in academic journals.
Gavin Butts, Class of 2025 at Loyola Marymount University, worked with a team that trained the RoBERTa language model on approximately 8,000 excerpts from medical textbooks, slides and documents so the model could be used to remove biased language medical programs. He said he appreciated the opportunity to use AI to solve a societal problem.
“A lot of people are using AI for commercial purposes and to make money,” says Butts. “But there are also many of us who want to use AI to improve the world.”