Undergraduate Student Spotlight

The top NYU team, comprised of juniors Zhiqian Chen, Kaiyue Guo, and Puming Liu, won the silver medal at the 2024-25 ICPC Greater New York Regional Contest.

Computer science majors Yvonne Wu, Emos Ker, Charles Wang, Benjamin Kang, and Dongjoo Lee, together with their advisors Professors Anasse Bari and David Nagel (George Washington), and other co-authors published a paper, "Towards Understanding Low Energy Nuclear Reactions: Structuring the Literature and Applying Data Analytics" at the IEEE Big Data Analytics Conference. Yvonne presented the paper at the conference meeting in Tokyo.

Pinze Yu and his advisor Michael Overton published a paper, "On the choice of signs defining Householder transformations" in the journal Numerical Analysis, Control, and Optimization.

Xi Liu and his advisors Gizem Kayar and Ken Perlin, published a paper, "A GPU-based hydrodynamic simulator with boid interactions," in the journal Parallel Computing.

Kyle Whitt and his advisor Anasse Bari published a paper, "New York City Mobility Analytics Index and the Relationship with Economic Activity" at the IEEE 2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence.

Computer science students Edward Hou, Charles Wang, Caitlyn Cui, Emos Ker, Alex Manko, Nawaf Alabdullah, Ali Alshehhi, Kelly Lawlor, Sebastian Straesser, and Advait Abrol, with their advisor Anasse Bari published a paper "Morocco's Football Triumph in the 2022 FIFA World Cup: A Data-Driven Analysis of Sociocultural Impact Using Big Data Analytics" at the IEEE 2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence.

Computer science student Sana Sajjad, with her advisor Anasse Bari, published a paper "Experimental Predictive Analytics Tools to Help Detect Fake News: A Survey" at the IEEE 2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence.

The "NYU-Leaky" programming team, consisting of sophmores Sihong Liu and Zihong Zheng, together with MS student Shidong Zhang, won the silver medal at the 2023-24 ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) Greater New York Regional Contest.

A paper by CS major Saatwick Panigrahi, together with his advisor Anasse Bari and UCSD student Swadhin Rout, entitled "Determinants of Global Hunger Index" was published at the 2023 Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, & Applied Computing (CSCE)

Jyotish Pari's paper "Teaching a Robot to FISH: Versatile Imitation from One Minute of Demonstrations", with co-authors Siddhant Haldar, Anant Rai, and Lerrel Pinto, won the Best Student Paper Award at the Robotic Science and Systems Conference.

Andy Polizzotto was part of the NYU-RTFP programming team which competed at the North American Championship of the International Collegiate Programming Contest. The team will be advancing to the World Finals in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt in November. The team is coached by Yang Tang.

Steve Ciervo's research presentation, "Using Predictive Analytics to Understand How Genes Interact in Alzheimer’s Disease" won third prize at the CAS Freshman Presidential Honors Scholars Plenary Session.

Sana Sajjad's research presentation, "Can AI Help Detect Fake News?" won 1st place at the CAS Sophomore Presidential Honors Scholars Plenary Session.

Jyo Pari (CS, class of 2023) published a paper, "Train Offline, Test Online: A Real Robot Learning Benchmark", with other authors, at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2023

Jyo Pari (CS, class of 2023) has had a paper "Teach a Robot to FISH: Versatile Imitation from One Minute of Demonstrations" with Siddhant Haldar, Anant Rai, and Lerrel Pinto, accepted for publication at the conference "Robotics: Science and Systems", 2023.

Jeff (Junze) Ma (BA/MS program), together with Rosanna Flouty and Craig Kapp, presented a workshop, "Working in Real Life: Augmented AR in Historic House Museums" on using augmented reality to "promote engagement and support access" for disabled visitors in small historic houses.

Andy Polizzotto was part of the NYU-RTFP programming team which came in second at the Greater New York Regional Contest of the International Collegiate Programming Contest. The team is advised by Yang Tang.

Sean Norquist (class of 2022), together with Adam Meyers, presented a paper, "On Breadth Alone: Improving the Precision of Terminology Extraction Systems on Patent Corpora" at the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop, 2022.

Jyo Pari (CS, class of 2023) published a paper "Playful Interactions for Representation Learning" with Sarah Young, Pieter Abbeel, and Lerrel Pinto at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2022.

Alexa Tartaglini, a CS and Math joint major, with advisor Brenden Lake and co-author Wai Keen Vong, published a paper "A Developmentally-Inspired Examination of Shape versus Texture Bias in Machines" in the Cognitive Science Conference, July 2022.

Jyo Pari (CS, class of 2023) published a paper, "The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation," with Nur Muhammad, Sridhar Pandian Arunachalam, Lerrel Pinto, at the conference "Robotics: Science and Systems", 2023.

Alexa Tartaglini (Math and CS, class of 2023) published a paper "Modeling artificial category learning from pixels: Revisiting Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) with deep neural networks", with Wai Keen Vong and Brenden Lake at the Cognitive Science conference.

William Brower (CS, class of 2020) received a "Best Presentation Award" at the IEEE Conference on Big Data and Analytics (ICBDA), for his paper "Using Artificial Intelligence to Predict Legislative Votes in the U.S. Congress", with Christopher Davidson and Anasse Bari.

CS major (class of 2022) Aashish Khubchandani's paper, "COVID-19 early-alert signals using human behavior alternative data" with Anasse Bari, Junzhang Wang, Matthias Heymann, and Megan Coffee, was published in the journal "Social Network Analysis and Mining."

Computer Science major Jason Chen has teamed up with students at Carnegie Mellon to create an interactive map that shows the spread of COVID-19 at the US county level.

The NYU Team Aqua Terrarium, with freshman Andy Polizzotto and masters students Muge Chen and Zhen Li placed fifth (Bronze Medal) in the inaugural North America Championship of the International Collegiate Programming Contest. They will advance to the World Finals in Moscow in June.

Lawrence Wang, a math major and computer science minor, is participating in the Microsoft TEALS program. Wang is a teacher assistant at Vanguard High School where teaches students Snap! and Python, plans the curriculum, and collaborates with other members of the program for teaching the school year.

NYU Programming Team 1, with freshman Andy Polizzotto and graduate students Muge Chen and Zhen Li, took third place in the Greater New York International Programming Contest and will advance to the North American Championship.

Yuling Gu will be presenting a paper "Acoustic Characterization of Singaporean Children's English: Comparisons to American and British Counterparts" with Nancy Chen of the Institute for Infocomm Research, at the workshop on Widening NLP at ACL-2019 (Association of Computational Linguistics).

Daniel Yoo has been awarded the 2019 Max Goldstein prize, given to an undergraduate who has used applied computing to improve life at NYU, for his work at ITS on the Transfer Student portal, the College Cohort portal, and the Prehealth Committee Letter application.

Ananditha Raghunath has been awarded a 2018 NYU Presidential Service Award "for her outstanding student leadership across the campus and for tirelessly working to bring women and underrepresented populations into the science and technology fields."

Louise Lai has been awarded a 2017 CRA-W GHC Research Scholar Award.

Louise Lai, a senior doing a double major in Computer Science and in Business and Political Economy, won third prize in the ACM Richard Tapia Poster Presentation Competition for her poster presentation "Airbnb: Predicting Customer Return Rates Using Recursive Partitioning". Congratulations!

Wanjing Ma, Computer Science and Education dual major, will be presenting a paper at the School Science and Mathematics Association 2017 Convention, in Lexington, Kentucky. The paper, "A Computer Tool that Will Allow Secondary Science Teachers to Differentiate Reading Materials for Students with Varied Reading Abilities", is based on her final project in "Special Topics: Natural Language Processing", taught by Professor Adam Meyers. Congratulations to Wanjing Ma!

Ananditha Raghunath, a computer science major, has been awarded a 2017 CRA-W GHC Research Scholar Award . She will be traveling to the Grace Hopper Conference to participate in their Research Scholar Events.

Computer science majors Ananditha Raghunath and Nadira Azi Dewji have been invited to participate in Mozilla's Open Source Student Leader group . Congratulations!

Emma Dickson, a senior majoring in computer science, has been working with Deena Engel and conservators at the Guggenheim Museum to restore the Internet-based artwork "Brandon" by Shu Lea Cheang.

NYU placed third at the ACM Regional Collegiate Programming Competition for the Greater New York region. Congratulations to team members Lingsong Zeng, Ojas Deshpande, Ziyi Tang and to coaches Bowen Yu and Evan Korth!

Whitney Mulhern, a student in the joint Computer Science/Computer Engineering program at Courant and Tandon, is co-author of the paper "Scalable and private media consumption with Popcorn", which has been accepted for presentation at the 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. She will attend the conference in March; her advisor is Michael Walfish.

Mia Matthias (Web programming minor), Caroline Slason (Web programming minor) and Jiwon Shin (CS major, NYU Abu Dhabi) will present their work "Examination and Code Analysis of Siebren Versteeg's 'Untitled Film 2' (2006)" at the symposium "TechFocus III: Caring for Software-Based Art" at the Guggenheim Museum. Their project was supervised by Deena Engel.

• TechFocus III: Caring for Software-based Art

Daniel Cohen received best poster for CS/Mathematics at the 41st Undergraduate Research Conference of the College of Arts and Science, for his work on building a tool that automatically generates advice to make GPU CUDA code more efficient.

• 41st Undergraduate Research Conference Poster Winners

Youngduck Choi received an Honorable Mention in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards 2015.

• Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards 2015

Abhinay Ashutosh has been selected by the Washington Square News as one of the 10 Most Influential Students of NYU in 2014.

• Most Influential 2014
• Abhinay Ashutosh

Six students competed in a TEDxNYU event titled “The Pitch: What's Your Angle?” for the chance to present their TED Talk at the club's annual spring conference. CAS senior Blazej Gawlik, who won the competition, discussed the future of artificial intelligence and its challenges.

• Students pitch TEDx Talk ideas

The tenth bi-annual hackathon hosted by hackNY took place in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Fall 2014. Students from NYU, Columbia, Stony Brook, Rutgers and other local schools came together to spend 24 hours hacking on projects, attending talks and workshops and interacting with sponsor booths.

At the 2014 ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest, held in Ekaterinburg, Russia, the NYU team placed 13th overall, and 1st among North American teams, beating out teams from such schools as MIT, Stanford, CMU, and Berkeley. Congratulations to the team Bowen Yu, Fabian Gundlach, and Danilo Neves Ribeiro and their coaches Brett Bernstein, Evan Korth and Sean McIntyre!

At the 2014 North American Invitational Programming Contest, the NYU team came in 7th. Congratulations to the team Bowen Yu, Fabian Gundlach, and Danilo Neves Ribeiro and their coaches Brett Bernstein, Evan Korth, and Sean McIntyre!

Mike Jaoudi, CAS junior and computer science major, is the creator of NYU Bus Tracker, a popular app that provides real-time locations and departure times for all NYU busses.

Recently launched at New York University, Kipin Hall aims to tackle the numerous inadequacies of existing online classroom supplements. “We did an initial beta test with 2,000 students and 17 professors at NYU back in September,” said Abhinay Ashutosh, co-founder of Kipin Hall. Ashutosh, a sophomore at NYU majoring in computer science, said NYU used Blackboard in the past.

Yi Louisa Lu has won the first prize in the Undergraduate Student Competition at the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization for her project "Unleashing the Power of General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit" under the supervision of Prof. Mohamed Zahran. Louisa is a senior doing a joint major in computer science and math. Congratulations!

The NYU Purple team of Bowen Yu, Fabian Gundlach, and Danilo Neves Ribeiro won the 2013 Greater New York ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, held October 27 at Yale University. The team answered all nine problems with no mistakes, and came in 1st of 50 teams, including teams from Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, SUNY Stony Brook, and Yale. They are invited to compete in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Yekaterinburg, Russia next June.

Four other NYU teams competed as well, and did very well. NYU White (Kelly Martin, Danny Padawer, and Chris Williams) placed 11th. NYU Bobcat (Yury Skobov, David Ackerman, and Aviv Goldgeier) placed 14th. NYU Torch (Stephen Hu, Weilun Du, and Dun Wang) placed 17th. NYU Gold (Y.D. Choi, Emily Lin, and Ben Xie) placed 25th out of 50 teams.

Mark Rich has received an honorable mention in the CRA (Computing Research Association) Undergraduate Research Awards. Mark's project, carried out under the advisement of Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, involved building a city-level traffic congestion detection and mitigation system that computes real-time traffic densities, based on data from noisy traffic cameras at different locations within a city. The system uses a belief network to intepret and integrate the data, and then leverages this information to accurately predict traffic congestion levels and potentially mitigate traffic jams. Mark is a senior with a double major in Economics and a joint major in Computer Science and Mathematics.

Kim Pham is one of eleven students selected to be part of the investment team of The Dorm Room Fund tasked with finding the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Di Wu was part of a "Team NYU Hurricanes," along with masters' students Mariya Miteva, Savvas Savvides, and Alexander Theororidis, whose project "Icon Lab for Green Map System" won "Best Engineered Award" at the Google "24 Hours of Good" event.

Adam Krebs, a senior majoring in Computer Science, has been awarded the ITS George Sadowsky prize, given to a student who exhibits exemplary innovation in using the Internet for community service. Adam has been extremely instrumental in revamping the Office of Sustainability's website http://www.nyu.edu/sustainability/ improving the web presence of the Office of Sustainability and making information about sustainability more accessible and readily available to the University community at large.

Evan Korth is featured in a Wall Street Journal article on the increasing popularity of Computer Science for undergraduate students.

At the First International Hackathon for Social Good in the Arab World, held at NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU-NY undergraduates Max Stoller and Tengchao Zhou, teaming with Monir Abu Hilal from PSUT (Jordan) won second prize for their application "OpenMena", a web-based resource designed to provide government data in an accessible format for computer programmers.

Four NYU teams, coached by Evan Korth and Sean McIntyre, competed in the Greater New York Regional ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Competing against over 50 teams from 22 colleges and universities in the Greater New York Region (including teams from Yale, Stonybrook, Cornell, Columbia, Cooper Union, etc.), our teams' results were:

• 8th place (7/9 solved): Nathaniel Weinman, Bowen Zhang, Stephen Hu ("NYU2")
• 11th (6/9): Do Kook (DK) Choe, Yuriy Skobov, Andrew Lott ("NYU1")
• 20th (4/9): Kelly Martin, Raphael Sofaer, Alexandra Qin ("NYU3")
• 21st (3/9): Nabil Hassein, Michael Morreale, Andrew Flockhart ("NYU4")

Congratulations to the students and coaches on this fine performance!

Gallatin senior creates app for face-to-face friendship.

Jon Chan, a senior at Gallatin, is building a business around an iPhone app he created for scheduling business meetings. The project began as a class project for the iPhone programming course taught by Nathan Hull.

Gauri Manglik is co-founder and CEO of the SpotOn company, which has created the SpotOn iPhone app to recommend restaurants. Gauri got her bachelor's degree in computer science at NYU in 2010. SpotOn began as a course project for a special-topics course in iPhone programming, taught by Nathan Hull.

Spoton launches in new york city. Is the iphone app a yelp killer?

Five students in the computer science department - Susana Delgadillo, Kelsey Lee, Elizabeth Pelka, Erin Schoenfelder and Albert Yau - worked on a research project preparing documentation for the computational art work "33 Questions Per Minute" by Raphael Lozano-Hemmer, in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The documentation facilitates conservation decisions about this work in particular and provides a model for this process for such works in general. Susana, Kelsey, Elizabeth, and Albert are computer science majors; Erin is a web programming minor. The project was supervised by Deena Engel of the Computer Science dept at NYU and by Glenn Wharton of MOMA and the NYU Department of Museum Studies.

Student project at MOMA

Jiao Li, a junior majoring in computer science and math, has received a Dean's Undergraduate Research Fellowship (DURF) award. Jiao's research studies algorithms for solving Boolean satisfiability problems on highly parallel architectures. He is working with Prof. Clark Barrett and Dr. Morgan Deters.

Angjoo Kim, a senior majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, has been awarded a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.

Students and alumni from our iPhone Programming course developed an iPhone app to give back to the NYU community bringing NYU's many resources into a united interface.

• NYULocal Article
• iPhone App

Students interested in participating in the Spring 2011 Hackathon can register now.

• Spring 2011 Hackathon Student Registration
• HackNY

NYU junior Max Stoller built an app that texts you after you "check in" to a dirty restaurant, and the data he's seeing is alarming.

Web App Donteat.at Warns You Before You Dig In

Max Stoller has written an app "Don't Eat At" which warns the user of health code violations at restaurants.

Article

Don't Eat At

Antony Kaplan, a senior doing a joint major in Computer Science and Physics, has won "Honorable Mention" in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards for 2011. Antony has won the award for two research projects he carried out. First, under the supervision of Prof. Douglas Schmidt of Vanderbilt University and Prof. Jinyang Li, he developed a set of tools for implementing applications of many different kinds in a cloud computing environment. Second, under the supervision of Prof. Margaret Wright, he did an in-depth study of the errors made by the Excel program in numerical computation.

More than 200 students from 33 universities gathered Saturday afternoon to attend HackNY's fall Hackathon at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Fourteen companies, including Meetup, Aviary and Drop.io, demoed their APIs before students settled into couches and chairs to brainstorm ideas while noshing on catered burritos.

Hack NY's Student Hackathon

HackNY

Oct 4th is the start of Tech@NYU's second NYU Startup Week, a series of widely diverse speakers and content focused on tech entrepreneurship.

Four young friends who are out to create a very different sort of social network.

Quentin Cook made video about that details the applications he made for his final project in the iPhone class last semester. The app itself was very good indeed, and the video is quite amazing.

Creating a network like Facebook, only private. A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn't force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

Diaspora

HackNY held its inaugural hackathon on the NYU campus, giving students the opportunity to hone their skills in a 24-hour hackathon, along with networking with several tech startups from the NYC area. In a terrific event, students from over 30 different area schools atte nded (some as far as Pennsylvania), listened to startups pitch their technology, formed teams and ideas, hacked through the night and came out on the other side with working demos to show off.

Jared Wyatt won a grant award to continue his project on sleep research Nina Chen won a grant award to continue her research project on song searching from user-generated input Melissa Ingram won a grant award to continue her research project "Exposure of 3-D DNA Crystals to Different Solutions"

Honorable Mention

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) provides developers and IT professionals with in-depth technical information and hands-on learning about the powerful technologies in iPhone OS and Mac OS X from the Apple engineers who created them. The WWDC 2009 Student Scholarship Program offers student the opportunity to learn directly from Apple engineers, meet fellow Apple developers, and advance their career. Scholarship recipients select from a rich set of sessions on creating world-class iPhone applications and more! Present at this conference were Professor Nathan Hull, Ricky Cheng & Mayank Maheshwari.

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

Alex used the Dean's Undergraduate Conference Grant to travel to SIGGRAPH '09, a computer science confrence held in New Orleans, to demo applications of a new multi-touch technology, the UnMousePad, created by Graduate Student Ilya Rosenberg and Professor Ken Perlin of NYU. He will be using this technlogy to research the limitations of human interaction with a multi-touch device that can detect pressure.

• Alex's Website
• Prof. Ken Perlin's Website
• Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund Grants
• Ilya Rosenberg's Company Website

My research project is an extension of Prof David Bindel's previous work about algebra-based overlay network monitoring. The research goal is to find efficient algorithms that can pick out a number of end-to-end paths in a network. These paths will be constantly monitored to infer the performance of other end-to-end paths in the network. We have and evaluated proposed some very interesting algorithms, and we are now focusing on summarizing our work into a technical report and a paper.

Prof. David Bindel's Website

Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund Grants

This event showcases projects that have been completed in various computer science courses this semester at both the Undergraduate and Graduate level. The courses represented at the show have links provided. This year a representative from Apple awarded the Best iPhone App Prize at our show -- a free iPod Touch!

Since its introduction, the Apple iPhone SDK has been revealed to be a powerful platform upon which to build sophisticated applications. Without actually having to own an iPhone, students were able to build and test their applications on Intel Apple Macs using the freely available compiler and simulator. (Macs are available in the ITS labs). In addition to the development tools, students became proficient in the object-oriented language Objective-C, the Apple iPhone Frameworks, and the principles of Cocoa development.

• Course Website
• Student App Website
• Prof. Nathan Hull's Website

Five of our Computer Science Department undergraduate students worked on an exciting new project with a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA). The students learned about conservation works of art that are "born digital" and researched works of digital art in order to document them for conservation and study purposes.

In addition, some students worked with primary source materials in the Bobst Library Archives to build on-line collections for further study and research.

• The Museum of Modern Art
• Bobst Archive Project
• Computing in the Humanities Course Page
• Prof. Deena Engel's Website
• Prof. Glenn Wharton's Website

Project Title: Using Object Category Recognition Techniques to Sort Garbage for Recycling.

In order to help alleviate NYC's growing trash program, Melanie (and her team) investigated methods to automate the separation of recyclable materials from mixed garbage. They created a prototype bin to collect a database of images of typical garbage and tested several Object Recognition techniques from Computer Vision and Machine learning. They found that several of these techniques could be used effectively for this purpose. The next step will be to design and build cost-effective sorting machines which integrate this software.

• Project Website
• Prof. Rob Fergus' Website
• Undergraduate Research

The contest took place on Sunday, October 26, 2008 at St. Joseph's College, Patchogue, NY. Our team placed 7th out of 42 solving six of nine problems (the winning team was the only team to solve eight, no one solved all nine). The contest is five hours long and the team that is able to solve the most problems within that period wins. In case of a tie, the team that solved their problems the fastest takes precedence. Problems range in difficulty from simple arithmetic to complex geometry and number theory.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities. Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today's technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering.

• Grace Hopper Conference
• Prof. Sana Odeh's Website