Khandelwal Receives CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award

1/23/2015 By Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS

Urvashi Khandelwal was one of four recipients of the 2015 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Award.

Written by By Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS

CS senior Urvashi Khandelwal received a pretty good birthday present this year—she learned she was one of four recipients of the 2015 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers Award. This award recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

Urvashi Khandelwal
Urvashi Khandelwal

Four awards were given this year: one to a male and female student in PhD-granting programs, and one to a male and female student in non-PhD-granting programs.

Khandelwal’s interest in data mining and machine learning began when she was in high school and her brother was at graduate school with a focus in data mining. He used to talk to her about what he was working on, and even though she did not understand all the intricacies of his research and coursework, she discovered this was a subject area she wanted to learn more about. She was inspired to do background reading on her own to learn more about this field and its impact.

When she got to the University of Illinois as a freshman, Khandelwal knew early that she wanted to get involved in research. She sent a note to CS Professor Jiawei Han expressing interest in working in his research group.

“He was extremely welcoming and warm and encouraging,” said Khandelwal, who has been working in his research group since. “Over the years he’s always been really helpful and encouraging and a great advisor.”

Jiawei Han
Jiawei Han

Of the research group and the graduate students she’s interacted with, Khandelwal said, “It’s been great. It’s nice to have these mentors that help me learn something really interesting.”

Khandelwal’s work with Professor Han has focused on heterogeneous information networks (HINs). Such networks contain multiple types of objects and links. They can be used to model many real world situations, making them extremely useful in solving a variety of problems in the domain of recommendation systems, information retrieval, etc.

Her current project, which is the basis of her senior thesis, involves creating a personalized list of recommended publications for researchers who are new to a topic. She plans to use phrase types and ontology in a paper to optimize relevance, use authors and venues to learn authority, and use meta paths to determine diversity and semantic justification.

“Urvashi is surely an asset to our group,” Han said. “She has been very active working on research, collaborating with multiple PhD students. She has been constantly generating innovative ideas and very good results on data mining research, especially related to heterogeneous information networks. We expect she will make notable contributions on research.”

Khandelwal was co-author on three publications presented at prestigious conferences. She plans to continue research in graduate school following her graduation.

As part of the CRA award, she will receive funding to assist her attending a research conference of her choice.


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This story was published January 23, 2015.