REUSE Students Tapped for Top Computing Research Honors
Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering (REUSE) program students Lindsay Popowski and Reed Oei were recently tapped for top honors as a part of the Computer Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award program.
Popowski, a senior at Harvey Mudd College jointly majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, was named a 2021 recipient of the award for her work in robotics and artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and computer science education. As a REUSE student, Popowski worked closely with the Human Computer Interaction Institute’s Brad Myers and Toby Jia-Jun Li to develop new machine learning techniques for generating vector representations of GUI screens of mobile apps, enabling potential applications such as GUI design aids. That work, in addition to recognition by CRA, was recently accepted for the 2021 Computer Human Interaction Conference.
Reed Oei (REUSE Class of 2019 & 2020) Oei, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Computer Science, was named a runner-up in the award competition for his work in a variety of areas including software testing, programming languages for blockchain, and automatic theorem proving. In addition to extensive work at UIUC to address “flaky tests” - software tests which can non-deterministically pass or fail - Oei spent his time in the REUSE program working alongside Jonathan Aldrich, Joshua Sunshine, and Brad Myers where he made important contributions to smart contract programming languages.
The Computing Research Association (CRA), established in 1972, aims to bring together computing research organizations across industry, academia, and government to effect change that advances computing while also benefiting society at large.
Sponsored by Microsoft Research and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award program serves to recognize those undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.
With support from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates’ program, the REUSE program is geared towards providing undergraduate students from institutions with limited software engineering research opportunities the chance to work on challenging, innovative research projects. Students spend the summer working closely with the Institute for Software Research’s renowned faculty to explore topics ranging from information visualization to self-adaptive system architecture. Capitalizing on the ISR’s tradition in collaborative and cross-disciplinary research, students in the REUSE program have the chance to work with researchers across the School of Computer Science, including Societal Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Robotics, and more.