Author: Ebonee Johnson

The CIS Colloquium series is proud to feature the Distinguished Lecturer for Fall 2020, Princeton University’s own Adam Finkelstein.

As a Computer Science professor at Princeton, Adam’s research focuses on the “art of science,” comprising audio, photo and video manipulation. Much like the title suggests, his lecture with CIS will focus specifically on “Recovering, manipulating and enhancing recorded speech (1905-2020).” Projects up for discussion and survey include the process of retrieving audio recorded onto a postcard over a century ago, as well as a method designed to make real-world recorded speech sound as if it was recorded in a studio!

***The seminar will take place on Tuesday, September 15th, 3PM-4PM. Click HERE for more info.

Penn Engineering Online Learning is offering up a special admissions webinar for its upcoming installment, featuring MCIT alumnae impacting the tech industry. Hosted by PE’s Associate Director of Professional Development and Networking, Emily Parry, the webinar will cover topics such as how to seek out community and mentorship, advice for women considering a career switch into CS, important resources to be aware of, networking tips, and more.

***The event will take place via Zoom on September 16, at 2PM. Click HERE to register.***

Although this current semester is Tony’s first with UPenn and the CIS community, the active duty U.S. Army Sergeant has been excited, preparing and active. When he’s not working at a  military Infectious Diseases Research laboratory as a Biological Research Assistant, you can find him practicing his python coding skills in preparation for his MCIT Online program.

Read more about Tony’s time with his wife and baby son, and his love of photography, below!

What research/ projects are you currently working on?

I am currently on active duty in the U.S. Army and working at a military Infectious Diseases Research laboratory as a Biological Research Assistant. We have been working on SARS-COVID research lately hoping to find a vaccine for the ongoing pandemic.

What has been keeping you grounded and healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Other than work, I have been working on my onboarding class for my Master’s program MCIT online and taking family (wife and 15 months old son) on trips to ‘usually’ crowded destinations in DC. Best time to be out there is when there’s less people out and about. I have also been working to improve my python coding skills before classes start. I like running and I have been working out consistently: blissful. I have also been active on LinkedIn connecting with professionals in industry and catching up with my family and friends in Kenya.

What future research/ projects are you excited about?
I am excited to learn more from the MCIT program and jump into any interesting projects.

Favorite culture intakes right now?
You can find me binging on specific YouTube channels. I haven’t missed a single episode of Peter McKinnon (a professional Canadian photographer and YouTuber): he’s very skilled and always has good content and tips. You can tell I’m into photography. Another content creator I follow is Destin Sandlin (a graduate student, engineer, and science communicator at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.) His YouTube channel is called Smarter Every Day and rightfully so as he always has very cool content. I also binge on anything Space and Rockets. I don’t miss any Rocket Launches even the frequent Starlink Satellite launches by SpaceX!

As the academic community has had to adapt to experience learning in a mostly virtual realm, the position of Teaching Assistant has morphed a bit as well. This year’s Summer 2020 TA Award Winners have been recognized for their outstanding ability to help facilitate efficient and smooth online engagement. CIS staff, faculty, and students are honored to have them!

Visit Penn Engineering Online to view the full list.

After receiving his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering back home at India’s University of Pune, Tejas Srivastava chose to join the UPenn CIS family as a graduate student (c/o 2021). And we’re so lucky to have him!

When Tejas is not listening to his favorite tech podcasts, or getting into a new workout routine, he’s probably studying ways to better interpret the data of human emotion. Find out more about Tejas and his work with the World Well Being Project below.

What research/ projects are you currently working on?

As a research assistant under Prof. Lyle Ungar within the World Well Being Project, I am currently working on building a generalizable emotion-based lexicon from social media data by interpreting and inverting deep neural networks for text classification. I am also working on some mini projects such as  building an online portfolio website to showcase my work, projects, experiences and learnings, and an app which shares select new photos from my phone and shares them with my parents and across devices (TV and tablet) back in India (still in progress).  Apart from these projects, I am spending time revising some subjects and preparing for the upcoming recruitment season.

What has been keeping you grounded and healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic?

COVID-19 has sure propelled me to inculcate new habits and hobbies to maintain my well-being, one of the most significant ones being networking and talking to people. I have been spending time to talk to my parents daily and talking to friends back in India and fellow classmates at Penn and celebrating birthdays and other festivals virtually. I have also been attending a lot of virtual tech meetups hosted by Penn and communities in and around Philly and meeting new people with similar interests. I am also connecting with a lot of Penn Alumni, and talking to them about their experiences, and seeking general advice from them.

I spent some time redesigning my room and specifically my workplace, to create a welcoming and clean setup, knowing that I would have to spend a lot of time there.
Since the start of the pandemic, I have also started to cook a lot and spend more time in the kitchen and have tried a lot of new dishes, and enjoyed taking cooking breaks in between work. Very recently, I have also started basic workouts at home, and going on runs and walks (with proper precaution of course!) in and around Penn Park and Schuylkill River, exploring University City and some parts of Philly, in order to get some fresh air and compensate for my old regular walks to the campus from my apartment. Thus, I would say that the pandemic has given me a chance to pause, and re-evaluate myself, and with some time on hand, develop myself in a lot of ways.

What future research/ projects are you excited about?

Me along with my research group have made some progress on the lexicon building project, and I plan to continue to work on the same, as we are on the way to promising results. Apart from that I plan to take the distributed systems course in the upcoming semester, and am particularly excited to work on the course project, which includes building a fully-fledged distributed cloud platform from scratch.

Favorite culture intakes right now?

I recently started reading “The Slight Edge” by Jeff Olson, which talks about the philosophy of being successful by taking insignificant and simple decisions and actions, consistently over time, instead of waiting for or taking the one revolutionary move, and have been trying to test and implement the same. I also enjoy sometimes listening to podcasts while I workout and run, and specifically follow the Artificial Intelligence Podcast by Lex Fridman, and The ChangeLog podcast, where hosts interview hackers, leaders and innovators within software development and open source. I also indulge in some Bollywood music and occasional Prateek Kuhad (one of my favorite singers) songs while I run. Mostly on the weekends, I spend some free time watching videos on YouTube, following the latest in technology, and admire the works of MKBHD, Unbox Therapy, The Verge and many other tech Youtubers, and have also recently restarted watching “DeathNote,” one of my favorite animes.

In the upcoming Fall semester, interdisciplinary academic center GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception) Lab will present a series of seminars and events with speakers from all over the country. Speakers include Tichakorn (Nok) Wongpiromsarn, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University, and Penn CIS’ own Jim Gee. The GRASP Lab’s faculty contains a large chunk of CIS members.

Find more info The GRASP Lab’s upcoming events and seminars HERE.

In their latest installment of informative presentations, Penn Engineering Online Learning invited musician and CIS community member Brandon Krakowsky to discuss how the MCIT program led him to various opportunities within the world of Penn.

Watch the full webinar HERE to learn more about Brandon (and his adorable dog), as well as what to expect in the first course of the MCIT program.

Putting in the work to sort reliable info on the internet from the not so reliable requires an amount of time that most of us just don’t have available. With the subsequent pressures of COVID-19 weighing on society, that time is a more valuable resource than ever.

That’s why CIS’ own Dan Roth, together with his team at the Cognitive Computation Group, have created the Penn Information Pollution Project.

In a Penn Today article, Science News Officer Erica K. Brockmeier described the Penn Information Pollution Project as “an online platform to help users find relevant and trustworthy information about the novel coronavirus.” The platform relies on natural language processing to not only analyze a source’s amount of credibility, but also identify the multiple perspectives that could serve as viable answers.

But the intricacy of language itself presents difficulties.

‘Language is ambiguous. Every word, depending on context, could mean completely different things,’ says Roth in the article. ‘And language is variable. Everything you want to say, you can say in different ways. To automate this process, we have to get around these two key difficulties, and this is where the challenge is coming from.’

Read the full article HERE

Additional information and resources on COVID-19 are available at  https://coronavirus.upenn.edu/.

Penn’s School of Engineering has issued a call for submissions from the Penn community’s staff, students and faculty alike. In the midst of a global pandemic, heightened tensions due to police brutality and systemic injustice, and looming economic crisis, Penn Engineering wants to provide opportunities for staff and students to share how they are coping, how they are thriving and what the summer may bring for them.

Below is a more detailed snippet of the School’s inspiration behind the project:

“In difficult times, we often turn to our communities to seek comfort, grow in our understanding of the world around us and to figure out the best way forward.

Penn Engineering’s “Summer Reading” project is our way of learning about what members of the School’s community are doing to engage and challenge themselves both as academics and human beings.

And summer reading can be about more than just books. We want to know: How will you be developing yourself as an individual and as an engineer this summer? What types of conversations are you having (or would you like to have) with your friends and family members about race? Are you completing a remote internship in your field? Making time for self-care is important, too. What fantasy worlds are you adventuring to this summer, and what souvenirs are you bringing back with you?”

Click HERE to submit a story of your own!