9/23/2022 Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS
Gargi Balasubramaniam, Emmanuel Gallegos, Ryan Marten, Samraj Moorjani, and Xueqing Wu were named to the 22nd class of Siebel Scholars, recognizing their commitment to academics and influencing future society.
Written by Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS
The Siebel Scholars Foundation announced its 2023 class of Siebel Scholars, honoring nearly 100 students in Bioengineering, Business, and Computer Science. From Illinois CS, students Gargi Balasubramaniam, Emmanuel Gallegos, Ryan Marten, Samraj Moorjani, and Xueqing Wu were all named to this year’s class.
Through the program, this formidable group brings together diverse perspectives from business, science, and engineering to influence the technologies, policies, and economic and social decisions that shape the future.
“Every year, the Siebel Scholars continue to impress me with their commitment to academics and influencing future society. This year’s class is exceptional, and once again represents the best and brightest minds from around the globe who are advancing innovations in healthcare, artificial intelligence, financial services, and more,” said Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman of the Siebel Scholars Foundation. “It is my distinct pleasure to welcome these students into this ever-growing, lifelong community, and I personally look forward to seeing their impact and contributions unfold.”
According to the Sibel Scholars Foundation, to date, the over 1,700 Siebel Scholars have driven innovations in over a dozen industries, launched more than 1,100 products, authored more than 420 patents, published over 42 books and more than 3,936 articles or book chapters, and managed more than $2.8 trillion in assets.
Congratulations to the following Illinois CS students:
Gargi Balasubramaniam
Gargi Balasubramaniam is a 2nd year MS student working with Prof. Han Zhao in the field of transfer learning. Balasubramaniam’s research is pivoted around making machine learning (ML) systems trustworthy and aims to enhance the robustness of ML systems in the real world through domain generalization methods rooted in representation learning and causality. Prior to joining UIUC, Balasubramaniam graduated as the Gold Medalist from BITS Pilani, Goa, India.
Balasubramaniam has contributed to her field with a latest publication at UAI ʻ22 and through research internships at the Technical University of Munich at Germany and American Express ML and AI. Gargi has previously worked at Microsoft and is currently interning at Meta Reality Labs. She has been recognized for her academic and all-round performance by 2 prestigious national awards - the K.C. Mahindra Fellowship (given to only 4 students in India) and the J.N. Tata Scholarship.
Emmanuel Gallegos
Emmanuel Gallegos is a graduate student and research assistant at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with Dr. Nancy Amato in the Parasol Lab on distributed computing for multiagent task and motion planning. He acquired his Bachelor of Science degree from California State University East Bay in 2020.
His prior work includes publications related to deep learning, computer vision, and thermal imaging for fever detection, with the aim of increasing situation awareness with respect to Covid-19. Gallegos also worked as lead software engineer for T’ena Health Technologies, a tech startup led by Dr. Charmayne Hughes with the goal of bringing modern health technologies to underdeveloped nations. His work with T’ena Health Technologies helped the company acquire funding from the COVID-19 Africa Rapid Grant Fund.
Ryan Marten
Ryan Marten is a Master of Science student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of the Hoiem AI Lab, where he recently led a team of five to create a new benchmark for evaluating computer vision models across several tasks and datasets. Marten is currently a Research Intern at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence where he designs new architectures for general purpose vision and language systems.
Previously, Marten received an Honors Bachelor of Science degree with Highest Distinction in Computer Science from the University of Toronto as a Laidlaw Leadership and Research Scholar. While at the University of Toronto, he completed research projects in the Dickinson Vision Lab, Dynamic Graphics Project Lab, and Vector Institute. Marten has been a visiting research intern at the Torr Vision Group (University of Oxford) and the CSAIL Graphics Group (MIT).
Samraj Moorjani
Samraj Moorjani is an incoming master’s student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His primary research interests lie in leveraging natural language generation to combat misinformation and make scientific knowledge more accessible. He is currently working on natural language generation for persuasive text with Professor Hari Sundaram. He is also conducting research with Professor Wen-mei Hwu on integrating a faster sparse matrix multiplication kernel into PyTorch to speed up inference on large language models.
Moorjani worked at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Applied Research on improving multilingual multimodal product classification. Currently, he is on the Ad Privacy and Responsibility team at Meta. He has also served as a course assistant for Software Design Studio, Algorithms and Models of Computation, and Computational Advertising.
Xueqing Wu
Xueqing Wu is a first-year master’s student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is now a member of BLENDER lab working with Prof. Heng Ji. Prior to that, she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2020.
Her research interests lie in knowledge-aware natural language processing, information extraction, and generative language models. She has three publications as the first author at top conferences (ICML2021, ACL2022, NAACL2022) and six publications in total. She also has rich industry experience, including internships at Microsoft Research Asia (2019-2020), ByteDance AI Lab (2020-2021), and IBM Research (this summer).