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CRA Recognizes Harvey Mudd Student Researchers

Joint computer science and mathematics major Lindsay Popowski 鈥�21 is a recipient of the Computing Research Association鈥檚 (CRA) 2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. CRA also recognized joint computer science and mathematics major Abtin Molavi 鈥�21 as a finalist.

Sponsored this year by Microsoft Research, the prestigious program celebrates undergraduates at North American colleges and universities who demonstrate outstanding potential in an area of computing research.听

Lindsay Popowski 鈥�21

Popowski has been involved in computer science research since her first year at HMC, and the CRA award recognizes several research projects she鈥檚 worked on throughout her undergraduate career.

With Zach Dodds (Leonhard-Johnson-Rae Professor of Computer Science) in summer 2018, Popowski worked on several interdisciplinary projects with professors outside of CS to incorporate computational elements into their research or pedagogy. She also researched introductory CS education.

During the following summer and in fall 2019, she worked with computer science professor Jim Boerkoel and other researchers in his HEATLab. 鈥淚 worked with another student to develop new dynamic scheduling algorithms for use in multi-agent interaction scenarios with uncertainty, like human-robot teams,鈥� she says.

Last summer, Popowski participated in a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University鈥檚 Institute for Software Research. 鈥淚 used neural-network-based natural language processing techniques to create vector representations of app screens,鈥� she says. 鈥淭his project will help users better program their phones to execute tasks, like other intelligent agents (Siri, Alexa, etc.), but this agent can be taught new tasks.鈥�

Popowski plans to pursue a PhD in human-computer interaction.

Abtin Molavi 鈥�21

鈥淢y nomination for this award was primarily based on a project in program verification,鈥� says Molavi, who worked on the project during summer research in 2019.

鈥淭he overarching goal of this subfield of computer science is to ensure that code written today and in the future is as secure, efficient and correct as possible,鈥� he says. 鈥淥ur specific contribution was the development of the first algorithm and software for counting听the number听of solutions to logical formulas involving integer arrays,听an extremely听common data structure in programming. Analysis听techniques听often take a program as input and produce logical formulas听describing the behavior as output. Counting the number of solutions to听these constraints enables us to answer questions like, How likely is this program behavior? and How much information is contained in this data structure?鈥�

Molavi plans to pursue a听PhD in computer science.