Vinaya Pillai

Year in School
Junior

Major

Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence Interactive Computing Scientific Computing

Research Mentor
Prof. Eshwar Chandrasekharan

Research/Engagement Experience

Interests
Outside of computing, I am on a non-competitive dance team, Ghungroo Dance Company (GDC), on campus.

Project Title

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
I was inspired to do CS from my high school AP CS Principles teacher. He really made sure we understood why we were coding the projects we were making and helping us understand the impact CS has on society. I learned to appreciate CS after seeing how much work and collaboration is involved in creating each product.

What social interests matter to me?
Diversifying STEM fields is an issue that matters to me a lot, especially women in STEM.

What is my most impactful college experience?
I was a Girls Who Code mentor last semester and being able to guide young girls who are already so interested in computer science meant a lot to me because it was something I wish I had access to when I was younger.

These are a few of my favorite things!
My favorite food is fried rice, favorite drink is mango/pineapple juice, and I love dancing.

Research Description
Under the guidance of Professor Eshwar Chandrasekharan, I am working with a team at The Social Computing Laboratory that aims to understand how online sites deal with a surge of new members onto their feeds. This specific study is using Reddit and understanding how different communities deal with a surge of new members after a comment ends up on the r/popular feed. We plan to deploy a PostgreSQL database on a server to store and ingest data. We will be structuring out the database schema and writing scripts to ingest data into the database. This database will store the billions of comments that have been collected and will allow us to analyze the changes in the quantity of comments for certain communities after they have a surge of new members. We can then observe what action is taken to moderate these feeds.

Biography
Vinaya Pillai is a junior majoring in Statistics and Computer Science and minoring in Business. Her interests lie in data science, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. She has experience with projects involving machine learning for business-related scenarios and basic website design. She hopes to be a part of research that deals with improving user experience by collecting and manipulating data. In the CS STARS program, she has worked with Professor Ranjitha Kumar and the Data Driven Design Lab. She worked on a mobile privacy project which collects and assesses how comfortable people are with the information they are required to enter on various apps. Outside of computer science, Vinaya is a classically trained dancer, likes to watch movies, and try new recipes.