Date Posted: 1/17/2020

The Computing Research Association (CRA) announced undergraduate research awards for 2020. "The CRA award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research." Some of the highlights of the acknowledged research include contributions from Cornell CS students:

Runner-up: Tianyi Zhang, CS and College Scholar:

"Tianyi Zhang is a senior in computer science at Cornell University. He works at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. His work to date has resulted in three publications, two in ICML 2019 and one in a NeurIPS2019 Workshop. In his first project, focused on Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN), Tianyi demonstrated that there are simple linear alternatives to GCNs through theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation. In another project, he explored the limits of low-precision arithmetic for machine learning training. Tianyi is a co-author of QPyTorch, a framework for simulating low-precision deep learning training which has been released as open source software."

Finalist: Qian Huang, CS and Math

Honorable Mentions: Horace He, CS and Isay Katsman, CS and Math

The CRA notes that "[t]his year's nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts."