The iSchool is well represented in the 19th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, which will be held on April 30 from 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. in the Illini Union. The iSchool is a Gold Sponsor of the symposium, which spotlights undergraduate research through oral and poster presentations, creative performances, and art exhibits.
iSchool students and mentors include:
- Joshua Lee, BSIS+DS sophomore, “Making the Union Basement Restaurants More Marketable”
- Samuel Park, BSIS sophomore, “Disability, Rurality, and Inequality: Housing, Employment, and Health Disparities in the United States”
- George Lu, BSIS+DS sophomore, “Social Media Misinformation Policy: What do Platforms Say they do?”
Mentor: Professor Jiangping Chen - Rabia Khan, BSIS+DS junior, “ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Evaluating Consistency and Representational Accuracy of AI-Generated Meal Images for Nutritional Care”
Mentor: Research Scientist and Director of the Center for Health Informatics Ian Brooks - Logan Patterson, BSIS+DS senior, “AI Diffusion Readiness & Responsibility Index (AIDRI)”
Mentors: Teaching Assistant Professor Haileleol Tibebu and PhD student Isaac Haizel - Samuel Wu, Statistics junior, and Saathveek Gowrishankar, Computer Engineering senior, “Data-Compute Asymmetry in LLM Training: Quantifying the Impacts of Data Scarcity for Low-Resource African Languages”
Mentor: Teaching Assistant Professor Haileleol Tibebu
*Outstanding Oral Presentation & Performance - Nicholas Yeung, BSIS senior, “Analyzing IoT Challenges Across Categories: Insights from GitHub”
Mentor: PhD student Muhammad Hassan
*Outstanding Oral Presentation & Performance - Rosie Xu, BSIS senior, and Maya Bernstein, BSIS+DS junior, “Classifying Fatigue in Multiple Sclerosis Using Functional Markers and Machine Learning”
- Julia Zurek, BSIS junior, “Empirical Assessment of Data Selection Strategies for Training Machine Learned Interatomic Potentials”
- Sarah Wheeler, BSIS+DS junior, “Have a Brief Chat: Examining the Acceptance and Efficacy of Motivational Interviewing Chatbots (MiniBot) on Promptly Healthy Choices Over Time”
Mentor: Associate Professor Jessie Chin
*Outstanding Poster Presentation - Benjamin Liang, BSIS+DS sophomore, Oliver Lee, BSIS junior, Hannah Li, BSIS junior, Sana Purdhani, BSIS+DS sophomore, Rui Yang, BSIS+DS freshman, and Julia Zurek, BSIS junior, “Designing a Hands-On E-Textile Workshop with Generative AI to Support Creative Problem Solving”
Mentor: Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh - Sanjeevani Mukherjee, BSIS freshman, “The Reading Time Machine: Transforming Astrophysical Literature into Actionable Data Using Citizen Scientists”
Mentor: Assistant Professor Jill Naiman - Kawthar Mousa, BSIS junior, “The Emergence of AI Literacy Scholarship: Publication Trends and Disciplinary Patterns (2022-2026)”
Mentors: PhD student Sydney Miller and Associate Professor Nigel Bosch - Phillip Nakamura, Computer Science senior, “Exploring Conversations on Agentic AI: Insights from AI-Focused Subreddits”
Mentors: PhD students Muhammad Hassan and Mubarak Raji
*Outstanding Poster Presentation - Benedetto Lozzano, BSIS+DS freshman, “Quantifying the Effects of Miscropped Figures for VQA on Synthetic Histograms”
Mentors: Assistant Professor Jill Naiman and PhD student Daniel Evans - Pratham Alavandi, BSIS+DS sophomore, “Mapping the Global Network of Youth Football Exploitation: A Data-Driven Analysis of Recruitment Pathways”
- Aiden Lee, BSIS junior, “From Rail Dominance to Algorithmic Roadway Corridors: How the Staggers Act of 1980 Reshaped Nuclear Transportation,”
- Pavitra Shankar, BSIS sophomore “Finding Value in RTutor: Student-Centered Design of AI Tools in Statistics Classrooms”
*Outstanding Poster Presentation - Shravani Mhatre, Systems Engineering & Design senior, “Exploration of the Effects of Sensory Grounding Cues on VR-induced Cybersickness”
Mentor: Teaching Assistant Professor for Informatics Programs Katryna Starks - Saloni Gore, BSIS sophomore, “Nationalism Meets Entrepreneurship: Rise of Buy American Movement and Ideological Recategorization of ‘Proudly Made in USA,’ 2000-2023”
- Jennifer Ruiz, BSIS junior, “Time-of-use Preference in Household EV Charging in Austin, Texas”
*Outstanding Poster Presentation - Boyuan Qiu, BSIS+DS senior, “Using Games to Explore Embodied Animal-Environments Interaction”
Mentor: Professor Christopher Lueg - Gwyneth Fox, BSIS+DS freshman, “Socioeconomic Status: A Fundamental Determinant of Self-Rated Health”
- Thomas Southey, BSIS senior, “Understanding Transport and Stability Effects of Divalent Additives in Highly Concentrated Water-in-Salt Electrolytes”
- Sunghyo Byoun, BSIS+DS freshman, “Solar Cell Characterization Through LBIC Mapping”
- Dulf Vincent Genis, BSIS+DS senior, and Shivam Patel, BSIS senior, “HarmonyForge: Bridging the Repair Phase in Music Arrangement Through Axiomatic Generation and LLM-Driven Glass Box Explainability”
Mentors: Associate Professor Yun Huang and Adjunct Lecturer Jeff Ginger - Yirui Lu, Statistics freshman, “Emotional Relationships Between Humans and AI”
Mentor: Informatics PhD student Lingtao Zeng - Marshall Warner, BSIS+DS senior, “Exploring 75 Years of Book Reviews from The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books”
Mentors: Assistant Director of the Center for Children’s Books Suzan Alteri and Associate Director for Research Support Services for HathiTrust Research Center Glen Layne-Worthey
*Outstanding Poster Presentation - Lara Terpetschnig, BSIS+DS senior, and Jennifer Ruiz, BSIS junior, “Reflecting on the Impact of the Digital Navigators Program on Marginalized Communities in East Central Illinois”
Mentor: Professor Anita Say Chan
*Outstanding Poster Presentation - Benjamin Vogt, BSIS+DS junior, “Figure It Out: Benchmarking Resistance of Open-Source Large Multimodal Models to Suboptimal Inputs for Chart Visual Question Answering Tasks”
Mentors: Assistant Professor Jill Naiman and PhD student Daniel Evans - Xiuning Kuang, BSIS+DS junior, “Comparing Multimodal Models for Visual Question Answering on Scientific Histogram Charts”
Mentors: Assistant Professor Jill Naiman and PhD student Daniel Evans - Andrew Kwak, BSIS+DS freshman, “Evaluating Fine-Tuning Strategies for Histogram Interpretation in Multimodal Models”
Mentors: Assistant Professor Jill Naiman and PhD student Daniel Evans - Tirth Patel, BSIS senior, and Om Patel, BSIS+DS junior, “Quantitative Analysis of the UIUC Student Housing Market: Cost-Quality Relationships and Trends”
- Hoang Vu, BSIS+DS freshman, “FGPA-based Technology in Real-time Biosignal Processing”
- Ari Coulekar, BSIS+DS sophomore, “Using Thematic Analysis to Determine How Students Cluster Visual Data”
- Jonah Witte, BSIS+DS senior, “Wristwatch Based Activity Recognition for Parkinson’s Tremor Monitoring”
- Benjamin Liang, BSIS+DS sophomore, Oliver Lee, BSIS junior, Hannah Li, BSIS junior, Sana Purdhani, BSIS+DS sophomore, Rui Yang, BSIS+DS freshman, and Julia Zurek, BSIS junior, “Human-AI Interactions in Craftwork Environments”
Mentor: Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh