2024 Celebration of Excellence

Mutma Adebayo is a third year graduating student in Computer Science + Philosophy. She has been a part of CS STARs throughout her entire undergraduate experience and is conducting research with Professor Gang Wang and Kirill Levchenko on the security of file sharing systems. She will be continuing her education at UIUC as an MCS student.

Stuti Agrawal is a graduating senior in the BS in CS. Stuti has been a research assistant in Professor Heng Ji's lab since freshman year working on Dialog Systems. Stuti has volunteered at various departmental activities to support Diversity and Inclusion initiatives led by the department.

Celina is currently a freshman studying Computer Science. At Illinois she is a project manager for CS124 Honors, a consultant at Illinois Business Consulting, and an incoming software development intern at Brunswick. She is being recognized for participating in the CS Student Ambassadors/Research Scholars program at UIUC.

Aryan is a sophomore majoring in Computer Science. He has a passion for teaching and likes to learn about theoretical CS. He has been a Lead CA for CS 173, CS 173 Honors and CS 225 where he has contributed to course pedagogy. He also interns at the Technology Entrepreneurship Center on campus and is currently working on a research project in the Parasol lab.

Aarthi is a Junior in Computer Science and is minoring in the Hoeft Technology and Management program. At Illinois, she has been involved in WCS, IBC, and CS Stars and is interested topics such as IOT and Web Development.

Emmanuel is completing the bachelor's component of our BS/MCS joint degree. He is a leader to our engineering community as the Internal Vice President of the National Society of Black Engineers. This summer, he is an incoming intern at Google and will return to campus to complete his Master's component.

Aashvi is a freshman studying computer science at Illinois. She has been researching methods of efficient parsing and sequence searching of large metagenomic files under Professor Brad Solomon through CS STARS.

Yaneli is currently in her freshman year pursuing a bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a minor in Spanish. Over the upcoming summer, she will be employed at Amazon as a software engineer. In 2023, she received the Amazon Future Engineer award. In my free time, I find joy in capturing photographs. and I indulge in the art of Folklorico dancing as a member of the RSO Ballet Folklorico Mitotiani.

Om's research focuses on systems and networking, emphasizing satellite applications. He works with Professor Deepak Vasisht and Indranil Gupta. He additionally interned with Microsoft Research's Networking group where he created an open-source simulation framework.

Yuxuan is a senior studying Math and Computer Science at the University of Illinois, with an interest in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Science Education. He has been a course assistant for CS 357 for five consecutive semesters and has been a research assistant at the Illinois Mathematics Lab. He is a recipient of the Mrs. E. J. Hoover Scholarship and the Bronze Tablet award. He plans to pursue a master’s degree with the goal of improving Computer Science education.

Jaelyn is a senior in Computer Science. She currently interns at Motorola Solutions research park as a software engineer. She is a board member on the Illini Cycling club and in her free time loves to cycle, be in the outdoors, hangout with friends & listen to music.

Max is a junior graduating this year. He is a past recipient of the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship. He currently conducts programming languages research under Professor Talia Ringer in the Illinois Theorem Provers lab.

Meghana is an undergraduate student majoring in CS and minoring in game studies and design. At Illinois, she's a student researcher for the UDL and Accessibility group. She is also an active member of Alpha Omega Epsilon.

Grace is a sophomore in CS + Advertising. She is in CS STARS and has interned at Fetch Rewards, as well as Auburn University.

Nicole is a first year undergraduate student studying CS + Economics at UIUC. She does research under Professor Katie Cunningham in computers and education, as well as serve as a Student Ambassador for Broadening Participation in Computation

Joanna is a 4th-year undergraduate Computer Science student minoring in Disability Studies and Interdisciplinary Health Technology. She is passionate about accessible computing and assistive technology and seeks to support independent living for people with disabilities. Her research aims to implement autonomous robotic capabilities and increase control modalities on Stretch with Dr. Amato, Dr. Olatunji, and Dr. Mahajan. She previously worked with ClassTranscribe and ScribeAR research groups. Joanna is passionate about CS outreach, inclusivity, and mentorship, and is also involved with Reformed University Fellowship as a Community Group and Ministry Team Leader. She is also an NCWIT 2024 Collegiate Award Finalist.

Ethar is a senior majoring in computer science. Ethar has served as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Programming classes for 2 semesters. She won 2 competitions at District 11 in Illinois and the hackathon at Stanford University. Ethar also competed in the Cozad New Venture Challenge this semester. She has already conducted four research projects during her undergraduate career having been involved in CS STARS, Google Computer Science Research Mentorship Program, Early Scholars Research Program, MERGE, PURE, and the SoNIC Research Program Workshop at Cornell University. She hopes to continue exploring human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and education in research.

Sonam is in the 3rd year of her Statistics and Computer Science degree and will be a student in the MCS program next year. At Illinois, Sonam has been a mentor for Software Design Lab, and been a course assistant for Data Science Discovery for 5 semesters. Sonam has had internships at the Healthcare Engineering Systems Center and Cargill at Illinois, and also software engineering internships at Adobe and Capital One.

Yoshee is a sophomore Chancellor’s Scholar majoring in Computer Science. She is involved with various RSOs, including AI@UIUC, R|P, ACM, etcetera, to inspire girls to take up STEM fields as careers. As a self-motivated learner, she is seen thriving while pursuing research at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and CS education, mental health and well-being, and online social community moderation techniques. Though she is still determining where she’ll be after four years, she strives to benefit the world by combining her hands-on technical background and humanitarian spirit to pay forward.

Shreya is a first year Computer Science student minoring in Earth, Society, and Environmental Sustainability. At Illinois, she is involved in increasing participation in CS through her roles as a CS STAR and the WCS Outreach Committee. She is committed to implementing technological solutions to global problems, which she is currently doing by consulting for software startups through Champaign Urbana Business and Engineering Consulting.

Anisha is a junior working with Professor Eric Shaffer on the POINT project to develop intuitive and communicative graphics for a gravity and general relativity simulation in virtual reality. She plans to continue working with 3D graphics and virtual reality development through her internship at Roblox this summer and research in the fall.

Divya is a 3rd year Computer Science Student and an incoming student in the BS/MCS joint degree program. At Illinois, she has done research with Professor Mohammed El-Kebir, has been involved with Illinois Women in CS, Reflections|Projections, and HackIllinois, and has interned at NVIDIA, Khan Academy, and is soon to intern at Stripe.

Esther is a junior in Statistics & Computer Science. She is an ambassador and researcher in the CS Department.

Charles is in his final year of the BS-MCS joint degree program. At UIUC, he has been a Teaching Assistant for CS 173 for two semesters and maintained his role as Captioning Coordinator for Illini Student Musicals where he utilizes his Python expertise for the music & arts. He is excited to graduate and is ready to tackle anything that comes next.

Sean is a junior in CS and Linguistics. He is a member of the CS 374 staff team, was a member of the 46th ICPC World Finals UIUC Team, and is conducting research in computational phylogenetics with Professor Tandy Warnow.

Sherry is a first-year undergraduate in Computer Science. She has conducted research in computational biology under Professor Brad Solomon, and is excited to continue with the Forward Data Lab under Professor Kevin C. Chang starting summer of 2024. Previously, she has interned at NASA Ames Research Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Accenture.

Divya is a 3rd year student studying computer science working towards her BS degree. At Illinois, she has been part of Professor Peng's lab for the past year working on analyzing LLM behaviors. This summer she is working at Verkada as a Software Engineering Intern on the Computer Vision team.

Sana Naffakh is a sophomore in the Computer Science department. At Illinois, she has been involved in undergraduate research through CS STARS. Currently, she has been working under Prof. Mohammed El-Kebir on visualizing the tumor evolution process. She has also been involved in new student outreach initiatives such as CS SAIL and Prospective Student Days.

Michael is in his senior year of the Computer Science & Economics program. He has previously organized hackathons for hundreds of students across the country and has interned at Snap, Meta, and Codecademy.

Gauri Patwardhan is an undergrad in CS. She is an ardent entrepreneur, regularly participating in COZAD, a UIUC pitch competition for student-led startups. She won an award at COZAD to pursue one of her startup ideas, Sprouter, which provides automated gardens for growing microgreens.

Eisha is currently in her third year of her Bachelors degree studies in Computer Science. On campus, she has been heavily involved in the Illinois Space Society, as the former avionics electronic hardware subteam lead for Spaceshot. She is also a past winner of the 2022 UIUC Undergraduate Research Symposium, and has held software internships at NASA (Kennedy Space Center), Collins Aerospace, and Motorola Solutions. In the summer 2024, she is excited to be interning for Impulse Space, where she will be writing embedded code on avionics flight hardware.

Nikhila is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science. She has been a CS STAR and a part of Professor Amato's Parasol Planning Lab for Robot Task and Motion Planning since January 2022. In the CS STARS Program, she hopes to delve deeper into how different parts of CS are evolving and is particularly interested in AI and motion planning. This summer she will be interning at Uber as a Software Engineering Intern on the AI Platform team.

Rama is a 2nd-year undergraduate student in Computer Science. At Illinois, he has been a CA for CS 124 and is actively researching utilizing LLMs for robotic manipulation under the guidance of Professor Yunzhu Li. His research interests are physics-informed machine learning and computer vision applications in robotics. He has recently picked up a keen interest in foundational models. He has interned as a software engineer for Liberty Mutual.

Garima is a senior in the CS + Advertising program with an interest in the intersection of technology, business and design and has been part of CS STARS since its inaugural program. She has conducted research under Professor Angrave in CS Education through the 2021 SRP program and currently participates in HCI and ML Research with Professor Hari Sundaram. Garima is also passionate about student involvement, and is an officer in Women in Computer Science, and was previously in leadership positions in Reflections | Projections, ACM, and HackIllinois.

Abhiram is in his final year in the Computer Science & Economics degree program. Throughout his time at Illinois, Abhiram was able to maintain a 4.0 GPA going through a rigorous curriculum. Additionally at Illinois, Abhi researched disability education technology with Professor Angrave. Outside of Illinois, Abhiram previously interned at Capital One, Amazon, and Kroger.

Diego is a junior from Puerto Rico studying Computer Science. He is currently interning at AbbVie, where he has explored his interests for full-stack development and building/deploying cloud-based architecture. This summer, he will intern at WBD working on the software engineering team for the Max streaming service.

Prisha is a freshman studying Computer Science. At Illinois, she is an active member of the Women in Computer Science Outreach committee and is doing research as part of the CS STARS program on addressing missing information in healthcare datasets using artificial intelligence tools.

Shiv is his 3rd year of his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Linguistics. At Illinois, he has been working with Professor Klara Nahrstedt throughout his time here. Shiv has published one paper to the IEEE ISM conference and has multiple full time research position offers. Graduating this May, he will soon be pursuing his PhD after one year of research work.

Nishi is a sophomore in Computer Science and Linguistics. At UIUC, she is a Women in Engineer Ambassador, a CS STAR, and she's involved in undergraduate NLP research through the BLENDER Lab under Prof. Heng Ji.

Shreya is a junior majoring in computer science at UIUC. Her passion lies at the intersection of technology and social impact, where she strives to leverage computing for the greater good. With an interest in data science, cloud computing, motion planning she is committed to making a meaningful impact through her research at Parasol Planning Lab. For this upcoming summer she will be interning at Apple on the Cloud team.

Amy is a sophomore majoring in computer science. She loves teaching students, working with Professor Lewis to research ways to improve the quality of CS education. On campus, Amy is involved with Reflections|Projections, and also teaches CS through Juni Learning. She will be interning at State Farm in the upcoming summer.

Firmiana is a first-year studying Computer Science. At Illinois, she works with Prof. Colleen Lewis on CS education research and is a Product Designer at Hack4Impact.

Jingtong is a sophmore majoring in Computer Science. She is a  Co-chair of ACM's Marketing Committee and is currently working on research involving remote sensing applications of machine learning under Professor Arindam Banerjee.

Nancy is a freshman studying Mathematics and Computer Science. She is a CS STAR conducting research under Professor Reyhan Jabbarvand on large language models (LLMs). She is currently investigating the impact of pseudocode on LLM performance for code-based tasks. At Illinois, she is also a James Scholar and involved in Reflections Projections.

Phyllis is graduating from her bachelor's in CS and transitioning to Master's. She is an ambassador and student researcher in the CS department.

Annie is a sophomore at UIUC and a student researcher at CS STARS. Her research interests lie in combinatorics and theoretical computer science, and she has authored papers on graph coloring and game theory.

Louisa is a freshman majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Statistics and Business. She is involved in CS STARS, Women in Computer Science, and Project Code. This upcoming summer, she will be doing research through the Blackwell Summer Scholars program and the NCSA SPIN program.

Xianrui is working on information extraction from scientific literature with Professor Jiawei Han. He is a recipient of the Honorable Mention for 2024 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and has interned with JD.com.

Federico Cifuentes-Urtubey is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research develops wireless system privacy enhancements for Wi-Fi protocols. While at Illinois, he interned at Apple, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Sandia National Labs. He served as the Graduate Ambassador in the SHPE chapter on campus to support a community of Hispanic graduate students in engineering. He has also been recognized by the Department of Computer Science as an Outstanding Teaching Assistant. Federico earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2018.

Shivam is investigating large language models with Prof. Jiawei Han and Hao Peng. He is the recipient of the Siebel Scholarship.

Mubashir earned his bachelor's degree from LUMS, Pakistan, and is currently a third-year PhD student at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on leveraging formal methods and large language models for network management.

Naina is a 4th year Ph.D. student. She has served as a TA for CS 173 including Head TA in recent semesters, and will instruct in the Summer. She is conducts research at the intersection of network analysis and behavioral game theory, focusing on trust and fairness.

Sayantani Basu is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also earned her MS in Computer Science.

Weixin Chen is a first-year PhD student in Computer Science Department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Han Zhao. She received her M.E. in Artificial Intelligence from Tsinghua University and B.S. in Information and Computing Science from Sun Yat-sen University. Her research focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of trustworthy machine learning. Her long-term goal is to make machine learning algorithms robust, generalizable, and interpretable. Her work has been published in top conferences such as CVPR, NeurIPS. She is the recipient of Wing Kai Cheng Fellowship and NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award.

Yang is a 2nd-year PhD student advised by Prof. Darko Marinov and Prof. Reyhaneh Jabbarvand. She won second place in the ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE 2024.

Ti-Chung is a CS PhD Candidate specializing in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), focusing on collective decision-making and human-AI interaction. His passion and devotion to enhancing educational experiences shine in his role as a teaching assistant for various CS courses and building tools to facilitate student learning experiences. Ti-Chung has also interned at Microsoft Research bridging academic insights with industry projects.

Trisha is a 4th-year PhD student in the Computer Science Department. She has been a teaching assistant for CS107 for three semesters.

Morgan is a 5th year PhD student in the Computers and Education Research area. She has served as the treasurer for the Computer Science Graduate Students Organization and is an organizing member for the Graduate chapter of Women in Computer Science. She has also served as a graduate ambassador for admitted PhD students.

Huzaifa is a system architect in the Apple Vision Pro team, where he works on <redacted>. Prior to joining Apple, he had the time of his life doing his PhD on architectures and systems for augmented and virtual reality. He would like to dedicate this award to his mother, Aafia, his father, Farrukh, and his advisor, Sarita.

Ali is a 2nd year PhD student in CS department at the University of Illinois. Recently, he has been awarded the 3rd position in IEEE/ACM Student Research Competition in ICSE 2024.

Adil is a 4th year PhD student at our Computer Science Department. He is the recipient of our Sohaib and Sara Computer Science Fellowship intended to encourage exceptional Pakistani students to attend graduate school and to help Pakistan's technological growth.

Seemandhar Jain is an MS student in Computer Science at UIUC working with Prof. David Forsyth on 3D reconstruction, and diffusion models to advance computer vision. He is recognized as a Siebel Scholar, class of 2024. He received his bachelor’s degree from IIT Indore, and is a co-founder of HealthAIgnite, Seemandhar has collaborated globally, published widely, and been recognized for research excellence, and community service.

Bowen Jin is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Jiawei Han. His research lies at the intersection of large language models, information networks, and text/data mining. He has been the lead TA for CS 412 and has interned at Microsoft and Amazon.

Priyanka is a 2nd year PhD candidate working on natural language processing and text mining research under Professor Jiawei Han. Her work has been published at top conferences, and she had also received the Intel SRC Research Fellowship for her undergraduate research at UC Berkeley.

Andy is a first year PhD student working with Prof. Hari Sundaram. He got his BS and MS degrees at UIUC as well and helps run the campus coffee club.

Bingzhe Liu is a final-year PhD working on cloud system reliability, advised by Professor Brighten Godfrey. She was a teaching assistant for CS 598 Cloud Computing Capstone and won the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.

Maleeha is a 3rd Year PhD Student at UIUC exploring her interests in Systems and Networks.

Jaron Mink is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and will be an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University this Fall. Jaron investigates computer security threats and focuses on how human factors affect the security of machine learning systems. His work has appeared in top-tier venues (CHI, USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, WWW), and has been covered by a variety of news outlets (New Scientist, The Transmitter, The 21st Show, Futurum Careers). He is an awardee of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

Dipayan is a PhD student in the Dept of Computer Science. His area of research is energy efficient system design for mobile SoC. At Illinois, he has been a lab assistant for CS101.

Rafae is a 4th year CS PhD student. His research interests span the domains of compilation for heterogenous architectures, and automated approaches using program synthesis.

Vidya Kamath Pailodi is a second-year graduate student working with Professor George Chacko to explore the field of Computational Scientometrics. Vidya has contributed to a project that presents a meta-method for enforcing well-connected criteria on communities in large networks. Before arriving at Illinois, Vidya worked as a software engineer in the thermotechnology department at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions Private Limited in IndiaVidya graduated with a gold medalist in ECE from the NMAM Institute of Technology in Nitte, India, where she earned an undergraduate degree in electronics and communication engineering.

Parth is a Master's student working with Dr. Eliu Huerta in the field of federated learning. His passion lies in the intersection of AI and HPC. Currently, he is developing scalable and resilient scientific applications at Argonne National Laboratory and NCSA. His optimizations of Alphafold2, a Google Deepmind model, earned him the esteemed 2023 HPCwire Readers' Choice Award for "Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences" and a publication in PNAS journal. Prior to joining Illinois, Parth graduated with Academic Excellence Award from IIIT Kancheepuram, India.

Abhilash is a 2nd year MS student working with Professor Jiawei Han in the field of long document summarization. His focus is on combining entity extraction approaches with Large Language Models in order to automatically summarize scientific papers. He has also been a TA for CS 225 for the last four semesters. Before Illinois, he graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics.

Harsh, a scholar in the MCS program, delves into the intricate nexus of LLMs and Security.

Ruizhong Qiu is a second-year MS student in computer science. He has been working as a research assistant with Professor Hanghang Tong on graph data mining.

Shradha is a second-year MS CS student, working with Professor ChengXiang Zhai within the DAIS group. Her research focuses on extracting creative analogies for educational purposes using large language models. Outside of work, Shradha serves as the Secretary for the Graduate Society of Women Engineers (GradSWE) at UIUC. Before joining Illinois, Shradha graduated with honors from IIIT-Hyderabad.

I'm Vignesh Srinivasakumar, an MCS Spring 2024 grad student. I'm a Research Assistant at Amazon-Illinois Center and work with Prof. Volodymyr Kindratenko to rapidly create domain experts using Large Language Models. I demonstrated my research in 3 minutes and won the Storyteller Award at Research Live! at UIUC. I've also been praised by the Prime Minister of India on national television for my hackathon project of using Virtual Reality with AI feedback to bring yoga to the masses.

Chamika is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science. He is working with Prof. Charith Mendis to develop data-driven approaches to accelerate systems. Previously, he has won the Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society Award, the Lance Stafford Larson Student Award, and the Richard E. Merwin Student Scholarship.

Saif is a 2nd year computer science PhD student and was the recipient of NMF gold medal for being the top student in his undergraduate electrical engineering batch. His research interests are in wireless sensing & communication.

Talha received his bachelor's degree from LUMS, Pakistan. He is now a PhD student at UIUC working in Networks and Systems with Professors Radhika Mittal and Brighten Godfrey.

Yufeng Wang graduated in 2023 with an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was advised by Professor Charith Mendis. His research is focused on Temporal Graph Neural Networks, particularly on optimizing their performance and ease of implementation, with his work being published at the PPoPP and ASPLOS conferences. He had previously received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for Fall 2021 while at UIUC.

Chris received his bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the College of the Holy Cross, and is in his fourth and final semester of our MS program. He has been a Teaching Assistant for CS 124 all four semesters at Illinois, and recently completed his thesis researching the relationship between homework approaches and student outcomes in that course.

Wally is in the 5th year of the BS/MS joint degree program. He is a Graduate Research Assistant at the CSL lab, and an intern for Visa. He won the 2nd place for the Ashby Prize in Computational Science.

Jun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests focus on statistical machine learning and trustworthy transfer learning, with applications in agriculture, bioinformatics, e-commerce, and legal analytics.

Ali is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate working with professors Karrie Karahalios and Ranjitha Kumar, researching how to effectively design and integrate AI-based interventions into clinical workflows.

Alex is a first-year PhD student in UIUC's ECE department specializing in remote sensing and signal processing under the guidance of Professor Lara Waldrop. His research currently focuses on calibration algorithms for NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission, set to launch in April 2025.Alex is also the current president of HKN, an honors society within ECE dedicated to encouraging and recognizing excellence by promoting academic achievement, leadership, and professional development among all students.

Yu Zhang is a final-year Ph.D. candidate advised by Prof. Jiawei Han. Prior to UIUC, he received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Peking University. He is a past recipient of the Yunni & Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship, has interned with Microsoft Research Redmond three times, and is an incoming Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University.

Yuheng is a second-year Phd student advised by Professor Nan Jiang and his research focus on theory of sequential decision making problems. He earned his MS degree in CS from UIUC, advised by Professor Hanghang Tong, and received the “David J. Kuck Outstanding Thesis Award”. He also won a gold medal in ACM-ICPC Regional contest during his undergraduate.

Wanli Zhou is an iCAN student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Business English from Shanghai International Studies University and a Master's degree in Translation and Localization Management from Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Before joining the iCAN program, she worked in marketing and business in the tech industry.

Kerui is a 1st year PhD student advised by Professor Chang, working on natural language processing. He received a master's degree from UIUC and has been a TA in CS 411 for a few semesters.

Vlas Zyrianov is a fourth-year PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Artificial Intelligence. His research interests focus on developing generative machine learning models for applications in robotics and self-driving vehicles. His research has been presented at multiple international conferences including ECCV, ICCV, IEEE ICSME, ACM/IEEE EMIP, IEEE ICPC, and SIOP; and finalized in 6 conference proceedings and journal publications.