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Student Researchers Receive CRA Honors

无忧视频 students Jack Ma 鈥�14 and Xanda Schofield 鈥�13 received national recognition in the Computing Research Association鈥檚 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards 2013 competition.

Sponsored this year by Microsoft Research, the contest recognized undergraduates who demonstrate exceptional potential in the computer science field.

Jack Ma 鈥�14

Ma received a Runner-Up designation for his work on a storage modeling and analysis project.

He investigated 鈥渄eduplication,鈥� a technique in which a storage system recognizes duplicate data saved on a computer鈥攕uch as copied files or files that have been downloaded more than once鈥攁nd then removes the duplicates so that only one copy is stored while the illusion of multiple copies in separate locations is maintained.

鈥淛ack applied his algorithmic talents to the problem of analyzing the long-term behavior of typical files. This analysis is slow, so he developed MapReduce-style techniques to speed the calculations,鈥� said Geoff Kuenning, computer science professor and Ma鈥檚 project advisor. 鈥淛ack has been a consistently innovative and productive researcher, and I believe that he shows exceptional promise for the future.鈥�

Alexandra 鈥淴anda鈥� Schofield 鈥�13

Schofield received a Finalist designation for her work implementing a new, auto-parsing algorithm for the Impro-Visor software project to help jazz musicians understand and learn new chord progressions.

Short for 鈥淚mprovisation Advisor,鈥� Impro-Visor is a music notation program designed to help jazz musicians compose and hear solos similar to ones that might be improvised.

鈥淚mpro-Visor is a fantastic piece of software trying to help jazz musicians in ways that result in a cool tool with a lot of elaborate code. It’s critical to be able to navigate around that to add something new without hurting any prior pieces of it,鈥� said Schofield. 鈥淭he project forced me to be both a good theoretician and a good programmer.鈥�

Schofield was part of a student team that worked with computer science Professor Bob Keller to develop a roadmap capability for Impro-Visor, where chord progressions are organized as 鈥渂ricks,鈥� and tunes are represented as a series of bricks.

鈥淭here are fewer types of bricks than there are tunes. Therefore, by learning to play based on roadmaps, it is easier to transfer knowledge from one tune to another,鈥� Keller said. 鈥淴anda contributed an idea for eliminating ambiguity based on assigning 鈥榗osts鈥� to brick types and applying the costs in a minimal-cost, path-finding algorithm.鈥�