Summer 2016 Visiting Students

Summer is a great time to visit both Chicago and TTIC! This year we welcome 27 visiting students from 17 universities, listed below (faculty hosts in parentheses):

• Deblin Bagchi, Ohio State (K. Livescu)
  
• Vijay Bhattiprolu, Carnegie Mellon (M. Tulsiani)
  
• Luka Borozan, U. Osijek, Croatia (S. Canzar)
  
• Bharat Chandar, U. Chicago (M. Walter)
  
• Arjun Chandrasekaran, Virginia Tech (M. Bansal)
  
• Cha Chen, U. Chicago (M. Bansal, M. Walter)
  
• Andrea F. Daniele, U. Rome, Sapienza (M. Bansal, M. Walter)
  
• Alex Gajewski, U. Chicago Lab School (M. Walter)
  
• Arnab Ghosh, IIT Kanpur (M. Bansal)
  
• Wanjia He, U. Chicago (K. Livescu)
  
• Dan Hendrycks, U. Chicago (K. Gimpel)
  
• Dong Ki Kim, Cornell (M. Walter)
  
• Myungin Kim, U. Chicago (M. Bansal)
  
• Aravind Srinivas Lakshminarayanan, IIT Madras (M. Bansal)
  
• Dian Li, U. Chicago (M. Bansal, M. Walter)
  
• Zhen Li, Hong Kong Univ. (J. Xu)
  
• Raci Lynch, Stanford (K. Livescu)
  
• Vivek Madan, U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (J. Chuzhoy)
  
• Sepideh Mahabadi, MIT (J. Chuzhoy, Y. Makarychev)
  
• Pasin Manurangsi, Berkeley (Y. Makarychev, M. Tulsiani)
  
• Yixin Nie, U. Chicago (M. Bansal)
  
• Manasvi Sagarkar, U. Chicago (K. Gimpel)
  
• Ridwan Syed, U. Chicago (M. Tulsiani)
  
• Trang Tran, U. Washington (M. Bansal, K. Gimpel, K. Livescu)
  
• Igor Vasiljevic, U. Chicago (G. Shakhnarovich)
  
• Yue Xu, California State Univ. (J. Xu)
  
• Xiaoming Zhao, U. Science and Technology of China (J. Xu)
  

Interested in joining us as a visiting student? Apply here!

Students also visit during other times of the year, and some students maintain longstanding collaborations with TTIC faculty.

Research Highlights

Our visiting students are working in a diverse range of research areas, including theory, machine learning, robotics, natural language processing, computer vision, computational biology, and speech technologies. Below we highlight particular research projects by profiling a few of our visiting students:

Andrea F. Daniele

Andrea is a visiting student from the University of Rome - La Sapienza, where he has been studying Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Engineering. At TTIC, he is working with Matthew Walter and Mohit Bansal on natural language generation in the context of providing indoor route instructions, which is the problem of planning and synthesizing route instructions with the objective to allow people to easily navigate unknown environments. Andrea is broadly interested in research topics involving both NLP and Human-Robot interaction. He is from Petilia Policastro, a small village in Italy and likes to listen to Jazz and visit museums in his free time.

Dan Hendrycks

Dan is an undergraduate at the University of Chicago studying computer science. At TTIC he is working with Kevin Gimpel on the architecture of neural networks and practical deep learning security, including recognizing adversarial images and speech. Dan is from the rural town of Marshfield, Missouri and enjoys advocating for various effective causes.

Sepideh Mahabadi

Sepideh is a PhD student at the theory of computation group at CSAIL, MIT. Her advisor is Piotr Indyk and her research interests mainly include high dimensional geometry, streaming algorithms, and graph algorithms. She is doing an internship at TTIC working with Julia Chuzhoy and Yury Makarychev on graph algorithms and embedding. She is from Tehran and did her undergraduate studies in Sharif University, Iran.

Trang Tran

Trang is a visiting student from the University of Washington, where she works on various speech and language processing projects. Her research ranges from modeling the language of online discussions to studying acoustic-prosodic features indicative of text difficulty. At TTIC, Trang is working with Karen Livescu, Kevin Gimpel, and Mohit Bansal on incorporating speech information to improve constituent parsing. Trang is broadly interested in research topics involving both speech and NLP, with a preference for applications in language disorders and social science. She is from Ha Noi, Viet Nam and likes to run (very slowly) in her free time.