Research Scientist Dr. Ron Artstein can usually be found (corporeally or otherwise) in ICT’s Dialogue Lab, focusing on his investigations into computational linguistics, developing language comprehension and speech using virtual humans, formal semantics and semantics-prosody interaction. But last week he took 14 of this year’s ICT interns on a field trip to Harvey Mudd College to the SoCal REU poster symposium, as part of his expanded role overseeing and directing ICT’s REU program.
Ten (of the 14 interns Dr. Artstein accompanied to HMC) were part of our Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) cohort. REU is a 10-week summer program which is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and ICT has been proud to participate since 2013. In fact, ICT has hosted the annual Socal REU poster symposium no less than 7 times since 2013 (here’s our video from last year’s event), but this year Harvey Mudd College took on the mantle.
“This year we have a great cohort who are not only academically strong, but also socially very close,” said Dr. Ron Artstein. “In their time off they have been doing activities and traveling together, exploring L.A. and Southern California as a group, all of their own initiative. I expect that some of these connections will last a lifetime.”
At Harvey Mudd College our interns attended a presentation and panel on graduate school, a technical talk on machine learning, and then presented their research in two poster sessions, together with undergraduate students from Harvey Mudd College, Pomona College, UC Riverside, CSU Northridge, and USC Robotics.
Here’s a list of our REU interns, their affiliation – and the title of the posters:
- Lawrence Benitez, Loyola Marymount University, “Tar AR Field Experience Engagement”
- Jacob Choi, Colby College, “Analyzing Inter-Annotator Agreement and Emotion Exclusivity in Multimodal Emotion Recognition”
- Emma Clift, St Olaf College, “Strategic Moves: Designing Negotiation Agents with Adaptive Expectations for Optimal Counter-Offers”
- Isabella Furst, Wellesley College, “Dialogue State Tracking with LLMs: Comparing Models Varying the Dialogue Context”
- Binze Li, University of California Los Angeles, “Optimizing Large Language Models through Strategic Integration of Reasoning and Fine-Tuning on Scenario Generation”
- Sushrita Rakshit, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, “Dispute Modeling with Statistical Learning and Large Language Models”
- Iris Shi, University of California Los Angeles, “Adapting Speech Recognition To Handle Code-switching”
- Ashton Simbol, Cosumnes River College, “User Interface for Authoring AI Tutors”
- Wesley Smith, College of the Holy Cross, “Offline QA Generation on Phones for Education”
- Tyler Thomas, University of Central Florida, “Cylindrical Metalens Design and Simulation”
And these are the four other students from ICT who also participated in the symposium:
- Raymond Chen, University of California Irvine, “Muallima: An Approach to Lesson Generation for Automated Tutors”
- Sophia Khan, Fort Valley State University, “Scenario Based Map Generation”
- Siddarth Mamidanna, University of California Santa Cruz, “Fine-Tuning OpenTutor Classifier with GPT-3.5”
- Gabriel Martinez, Southwestern College (Chula Vista), “Generating Effective Distractors for Multiple Choice Questions”
“The symposium gave our students a taste of what a research conference is like,” said Dr. Artstein. “And, hopefully, this will encourage some of them to pursue graduate education.”
“It is also a lot of fun!” he pointed out. “Students also get to see a different university. In fact, one of our interns, who is currently in community college, is considering transferring to Harvey Mudd, based on this experience.”
Finally, Ron Artstein summed up the REU experience:
“The REU program is great for the students because they get to contribute to actual research that is not available at their home institutions,” he said. “And, In return, here at ICT, we benefit from original contributions and perspectives by students with different backgrounds – which is really good for us too.”
Applications for our 2025 cohort of Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) will open in December.
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