What do Hollywood celebrities and CDS faculty and students have in common? Awards.
Leaping from one success to the next, this month saw the election of our talented Founding Director, Yann LeCun, to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his work in computer vision and artificial intelligence. Sam Bowman and Kyunghyun Cho also recently received Google Faculty Research Awards for their phenomenal work in NLP and neural networks.
Our students were also recently recognized for their research at the very first CDS Academy Awards. Hosted at our fifth avenue facilities, the swanky event was complete with shiny gold trophies, beverages, food, and live piano music to celebrate particularly outstanding coursework projects that our students have completed during their degree.
All the projects were evaluated by CDS Faculty and there were awards up for grabs in seven categories. Congratulations to our winners:
- Baby Unicorn: Hezhi Wang, Han Zhao, and Storm Avery Ross, for building an interactive New York City trip planner.
- Best Distributed: Osvaldo Bulos Ramirez, Shixin Li, and Zewei Liu, for building a system that identifies local and global events by aggregating page views of Wikipedia articles across a number of different languages.
- Best First-Year: Dhruv Madeka, for showing strong propensity not just for practical data science but for advanced level research, as demonstrated by his recent research project which combined machine learning methodologies with financial modelling tools to address election forecasting.
- Best Social Impact: Yiqiu Shen, Xinsheng Zhang, and Zemin Yu, for using data science methods to identify responsible groups in a terrorist attack.
- Best Multi-Media: Lee Tanenbaum, Kailing Wang, Xianzhi Cao, and Zacharaiah Zhang, for building a sophisticated content-based recommendation engine.
- Best Data Visualization: Christina Bogdan, Varun DN, and Alexandre Sablayrolles, for presenting a new model for visualizing retweet networks.
- Best Deep Learning: Andrew Drozdov, Katrina Evitmova, for their work with Mutual Information and InfoGAN.
A massive thank you to the CDS Leadership Circle, Remi Moss, Kathryn Angeles, and Loraine Nascimento for organizing such a lovely event!
by Cherrie Kwok