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.***
Tony Kipkemboi (Image: courtesy of Tony Kipkemboi)
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!
Clockwise (from top left): Brandon Joel Gonzalez, Katie Pizziketti, Nicole Chiou, Serena Gandhi (Image: Penn Engineering Online Learning Twitter Acct.)
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!
Tejas Srivastava (Image: courtesy of Tejas Srivastava)
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.
Oladapo (Dapo) Afolabi, final year CS PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, was the featured speaker at GRASP Lab’s latest seminar, titled “Data Driven Perception for Autonomy.”
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.
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.
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.’
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.
“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?”
Tuesday, June 30, 2020 | 6:00 PM PT/9:00 PM ET Join Penn Club LA and Rolling Stone Senior Writer Jamil Smith (Penn ’97) for a timely and topical discussion on Tuesday, June 30 at 6 pm PT. Jamil will discuss his recent cover story in Rolling Stone (The Power of Black Lives Matter) and issues relating to the current social justice movement around Black Lives Matter and racial inequity in America. Host: Penn Club of Los Angeles Featuring: Jamil Smith C’97 Click here to register. – –
Tuesday, June 30, 2020 | 6:00 PM EDT Please join us in reading and discussing: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. Join us Tuesday, June 30 at 6pm EST for a virtual discussion on the book! Please RSVP at https://bit.ly/lclangeladavis to receive Zoom link. Host: La Casa Latina – –
Tuesday, June 30, 2020 | 8:00 PM EDT Due to Covid-19 and civil unrest in the country, this year’s PennGALA / YaleGALA annual Pride party has been rescheduled and in its place, we will be hosting a conversation about Pride, allyship and solidary between the Black and LGBTQ communities. We invite you to participate in the conversation as our speakers take us on a journey to explore how we can support and advance our communities. Click here to register. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Host: PennGALA & YaleGALA Featuring: Malik Muhammad, Associate Director of the LGBT Center and Thomas Simsarian Dolan, Yale C’05 – –
July 9, 2020 | 7:00 PM EDT Our speakers will discuss Diversity & Inclusion, their experience as Penn students, and the importance of the James Brister Society. Host: James Brister Society, Penn Club of San Francisco Featuring: Trustee Ramanan Raghavendran, ENG’89, W’89, LPS’15, Trustee Patricia Martin, MD, M’85, Trustee Michael Barrett, ENG’89 Click here to register. – –
July 14, 2020 | 7:00 PM EDT With a focus on current events, police brutality, juvenile justice, and prison reform how are activists today forging change for our communities? Host: Penn Spectrum on the Road Speakers: Sara Reese Lomax, C’87, Judith Browne Dianis, W’87 Click here to register. – –
Penn Alumni Reading Club
Discussion will be held in August – date and time to be announced soon Host: Black Alumni Society, Alumni Education
Presentation still from Pedro Peterson’s “Screening for mental illness from mobile phone data: a detection of psychotic symptoms.”
This year’s Spring 2020 DATS Presentation featured a wide variety of insightful and relevant topics. Below, you’ll find a list of the presenters, in addition to some project goals and key takeaways.
“A hierarchical bayesian approach for tagged playlist generation”
Presenter: Anish Jain Advised by: Eric Bradlow Conclusion: “There’s a very high degree of heterogeneity in moods/activities definition across music listeners, and there’s quite a high degree of homogeneity in definition of genre across music listeners.”
“A data set for training QA systems to answer questions about novels”
Presenter: Yonah Mann Advised by: Chris Callison-Burch and Clayton Greenberg Goal: “Given a context which is a document or a set of documents, can you teach a system to answer questions in that context?”
“Understanding film characters and their social networks through a gender lens”
Presenter: Weizhen Sheng Advised by: Ani Nenkova Conclusion: “Gender affects how characters are portrayed and impacts their role in a social network.”
“Predicting the career success of NBA players from college statistics and draft timing”
Presenter: Jimmy Gao Advised by: Shane Jenson Inspiration: “As a diehard basketball fan, I constantly follow the NBA draft, and the draft stakes are pretty high right now. The increase in salary cap: this allows a lot of players to demand very expensive contracts.”
“Screening for mental illness from mobile phone data: a detection of psychotic symptoms”
Presenter: Pedro Petersen Advised by: Ian Barnett Asks the question: ” What if it were possible to help tackle the mental health crisis? Even if diagnosed, perhaps a close monitoring could help on treatment.”
“The carbon shock: investor response to the British Columbia carbon tax”
Presenter: Akshay Malhotra Advised by: Frank Diebold Takeaway: Market fear is upticked by “the idea that once a carbon tax or some sort of similar legislative policy is introduced, companies [are left with] all these assets that no longer produce value” (“stranded assets”).
“Predicting academic success of Masters students using application data”
Presenter: Karen Shen Advised by: Boon Thau Loo and Ira Winston Goals: “Create a data-driven approach to help admissions staff identify which students will struggle to graduate and which students will succeed in the Penn Engineering Masters Program…find which factors in the application profile are most indicative of future academic performance.”
