POST-eCSR WORKSHOPS

After the workshop, you will receive a participation certificate and a stipend. Through and after the workshop we will be connecting you with CS research faculty. Students who complete the workshop, and are interested, will be eligible to apply for undergraduate research positions with the faculty listed below. Funding for these positions will depend on the research group, however, we will be able to offer some funded research assistant positions through Break Through Tech Chicago. More details will be provided at the workshop.

UIC CS Faculty interested in involving undergraduate students in CS research:

William Mansky

Research Focus: Programming Language Semantics and Verification

Project description: My research group works on building software that’s logically guaranteed to work correctly. A project would involve learning to use state-of-the-art program verification tools, extracting the code that implements interesting features from a target program (such as the communication code from a web server, or the synchronization from a high-performance data structure), and building a logical proof of correctness for that code.

Minimum course requirements: CS 151 and CS 201

Email: mansky1@uic.edu

Fabio Miranda

Research focus: Visualization, Visual Analytics, Computer Graphics, Data Management, Data Science

Project description: The undergraduate student will be responsible for implementing techniques and tools for data wrangling, annotation, and visualization of a large database of publicly available spatiotemporal datasets describing various sidewalk features, from different cities. The student will get in touch with multiple components of the data science pipeline, from pre-processing to visual analytics.

Minimum course requirements:

CS 251

Email: fabiom@uic.edu

Chris Kanich

Research Focus: Cybersecurity & Privacy

Project description: Technical mechanisms for supporting a people's remap of the 50 wards of Chicago. In 2021, Chicago will reconfigure its ward map - this determines which city council member represents you at city hall based on where you live. We have an opportunity to use technology to help draw the best map possible, but to do that we need to collect data in an equitable fashion. This project will embed the student in a cross-disciplinary team collecting and analyzing Chicagoans' opinions about what defines their communities, and helping draw a map that can help Chicago be the best city that it can possibly be.

Minimum course requirements: previous research experience (non-CS is OK), Introduction to Data Science is preferred but not required.

Email: ckanich@uic.edu

Natalie Parde

Research Focus: Natural Language Processing

Project description: Undergrad researchers will have the opportunity to collaborate with PhD students on a variety of projects, depending on needs and student preferences. Current active projects include automated monitoring of cognitive health status through spoken language analysis, automated measurement of medical self-disclosure in online forums and social media, automated identification of COVID-19 disease variables from free-text clinical notes, automated detection of mental health issues from forum posts, multimodal grounded language learning, and resource-efficient language modeling. Student roles will include high-level project design, data annotation, and programming (primarily in Python).

Minimum Course Requirements: None, but CS 421 (Natural Language Processing), CS 412 (Machine Learning), or CS 418 (Data Science), or equivalent background exposure through YouTube/online courses, would all be helpful.

Email: parde@uic.edu

Andrew Johnson

Research Focus: Visualization, Collaboration, User Interaction, Virtual and Augmented Reality

Project description: One of our projects is trying and help groups of people work together in a shared space more effectively by making the room a more active assistant. The room can listen to what people are saying, see where people are, how they are gesturing, what they are looking at, allowing people working to understand data to ask for ‘these to be moved over there’ or ‘show these values on that map’ or other more ‘natural’ interactions. The student could work on converting data from the various sensors into usable knowledge, test out the interfaces, help out with user studies.

Minimum course requirements: CS 251. Knowledge of any of 415 (Vision), 421 (NLP), 422 (User Interfaces), 424 (Visualization), 425 (graphics), 426 (video game design) would be helpful.

Email: ajohnson@uic.edu

Peihan Miao

Research Focus: Cryptography, Privacy, Theory, Security

Project Description: The project will focus on secure multi-party computation (MPC), which allows multiple parties to perform computation on their joint data while preserving data privacy. The student will learn and implement state-of-the-art practical MPC protocols and optimize the protocols for specific applications such as privacy-preserving machine learning, secure analytics on sensitive medical data, and digital contact tracing.

Minimum Course Requirements: CS 251

Email: peihan@uic.edu

Joseph Michaelis

Research focus: sits at the nexus of learning sciences and human-computer interaction disciplines with a focus on long-term interactions and developing interest in STEM. In this work, I design and assess educational technologies by utilizing human-centered methods and interaction modeling in HCI, and on interest, motivation and social-cultural learning perspectives in the learning sciences.

Project Desciption: We are beginning a project to design and implement an out-of-school program, MyTurn, for middle school girls (6^th and 7^th grade) to promote their participation in pathways towards computing related fields. MyTurn will partner students with mentors from area colleges during an 8-week program on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, to design and program social robots for a variety of applications, including artistic expression, companionship and assistance, and augmenting human work and play. Our research lab is looking for undergraduates to 1) develop and test programming for social robots to build learning supports for the students when they engage in the program, 2) develop and provide feedback on methods of training mentors to guide students during their learning.

No minimum coursework is required

Email: jmich@uic.edu

Diana Diaz Herrera

Research focus: Bioinformatics, Health Informatics, Applied Machine Learning.

Project description: Undergraduate students will join a mature project that applies ML and AI techniques to the identification of breast cancer (BC) subtypes. They will learn to use our tool to analize a BC dataset to then perform experiments to compare different tools. Students will learn transferable skills such data pre-processing, data analysis, model training, model testing, and visualization. Background on molecular biology is not required.

Minimum course requirements: none but Applied Statistical Methods or similar courses would be valuable.

Email: dmdh@uic.edu

Ian Kash

Research focus: Economics and computation, reinforcement learning, fairness in machine learning.

Project Desciption: I am part of a large group working on a number of projects that raise issues of fairness in machine learning, particularly where some data is missing or deficient, decisions are made dynamically over time, or there is disagreement among stakeholders. Topics and datasets currently being investigated include the way that restaurant inspections are scheduled to ensure food safety, the way 311 complaints are addressed, and the way vaccines are being distributed.

Minimum Course Requirements: CS251. Experience or coursework with statistics, machine learning, or data science a plus.

Email: iankash@uic.edu

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