Twenty CSE graduate students presented their research to an estimated 650 people attending the Jacobs School's Research Expo on April 16.
Among all CSE entries, the computer science best poster award went to Narendran Thangarajan (pictured at left), a Master's student advised by CSE research scientist Nadir Weibel. The poster focused on Thangarajan's work analyzing social media to characterize HIV at-risk populations in San Diego. The researcher went beyond existing research on the feasibility of using Twitter to study HIV spread in the United States. He took the approach further, "identifying and characterizing HIV at-risk populations locally in the San Diego are at a more granular scale in terms of both demographics and communities." He used dynamic visualizations, social network analysis, graph algorithms and machine-learning techniques to combine information from Twitter and data on HIV-infected patients provided by UC San Diego's AntiViral Research Center. The goal: to "learn how actual HIV-infected users behave on Twitter and build a computational model that can then be applied to other users to investigate similarities in their behaviors." Thangarajan expects to graduate with his M.S. degree this June. [Photo by Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications]
The jury also selected three other CSE posters deserving of Honorable Mentions:
- Automated Annotation of Coral Reef Survey Images, by Oscar O. Beijbom (advised by David Kriegman and Serge Belongie)
- Design Guidelines and Optimization of DRAM Interconnect, by Mulong Luo (advised by Andrew B. Kahng)
- Gadgetron: Synthesizing Electronic Gadgets, by Devon James Merrill (advised by Steven Swanson)