Eighteen computer science and software engineering students will present the results of individual and team work on cutting-edge computing research projects, the first step toward a possible research-based career, during the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering’s inaugural research symposium May 8, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., on campus. All presentations in Moench Hall are free and open to the public.

Students spent 30 weeks during this academic year completing research-based capstone projects, with faculty advisors, to complete their Rose-Hulman degree requirements. Some of the projects will be part of future international conferences and academic journals, noted symposium organizer Jason Yoder, PhD, assistant professor of computer science and software engineering.

Students planning to make individual presentations from 10 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. in rooms E-104 and B-111 of Moench Hall will include:

• Jacob Ashworth, on Solving the Nonisomorphic Realization Problem for DNA Self-Assembly
• Ziqi (Andrea) Chen, on A Computation Model of Why Males are Honest When Pursuing a Mate
• Spencer Chubb, on Streamlining Combinatorial Auctions with Unified Neural Networks
• Endia Clark, on A Comparison of Statistical Models and Machine Learning for Epilepsy Prediction Analysis
• Olivia Davis, on Evaluating K-mers in Measuring Population Diversity of Unaligned Sequences
• William Hawkins, on Modeling Baseball as a Markov Chain Using a 313-State Transition Matrix
• Nat Hurtig, on An Improved Policy for the Known-Size M/G/1 Queue with Preemption Costs
• Stephen Jung, on Evaluating Mutation Coverage: Human-Created vs. Automated Test Cases
• Nyomi Morris, on Designing a Robotic Sidekick to Aid Self-disclosure in Domestic Abuse Survivors
• Jacob Olinger, on The AI Applications in Radiology: Regulation, Evaluation, and Usage
• Connor Rhys Peper, on Optimizing Flag Selection and Phase-Order in the GHC Compiler
• Tristan Scheiner, on Channel Selection for Intermediate Fusion using Reinforcement Learning in Cooperative Vehicle-to-Vehicle Perception

Meanwhile, the team of Julian Fiorito, David Gottlieb, Dylan Luttrell, and Yuanyu (Helen) Wang have completed research on Exploring Adaptive Approaches for Improving Reinforcement Learning. Xianshun Jiang and Yujie Zhang combined to study the Explainability of Machine Learning in an Intrusion Detection System. 

Many of these students plan to continue their research interests in graduate school or studying in doctoral programs at Brown University, Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, Colorado School of Mines or Saint Louis University, while others will work in industry with Edgile, Northrop Grumman, State Farm Insurance, and Telemetry Sports.

The symposium’s keynote talk, from 9-10 a.m. in Room E-104 of Moench Hall, will be presented by Luyi Xing, PhD, founder of Indiana University’s System Security Foundation Laboratory and an associate professor of computer science at the university. He received the National Science Foundation’s Career Achievement Award in 2021 for his scholarly work in Internet of Things system security. His keynote will address the topic: Towards Understanding and Eliminating Privacy Violations in Mobile Applications and Software Supply Chain. 

An alumni talk from 3:30-4 p.m. in Room E-104 will be presented by Ph.D. candidate Larry Gates of IU’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. His most recent research project, a human-subjects study on explanation formats, won best paper at the International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning in 2023. The topic of his Rose-Hulman symposium talk will be Building Context Cases: Improving Computer Vision Performance with Contextual Information. 

An outstanding senior thesis award, honoring 1965 Rose-Hulman alum and former computer science professor Michael Atkins, may be presented to a student having the most commendable project completed this year, based upon the opinion of the department faculty.