Beatrice Bevilacqua

Purdue CS: Tell us about yourself.

BB: I am Beatrice Bevilacqua from Italy. I am a second-year master student in Engineering in Computer Science at Sapienza, University of Rome. My background in computer science topics range from low-level programming to data-related topics. This leads me to always seek for solutions that not only solve the task, but that also are optimized. I like discovering new things, I love traveling and I am always looking for opportunities.

Purdue CS: How did you become interested in computer science and research?

BB: In my first year at university, I was interested in control engineering. Later, I discovered computer science topics in class and I fell in love with them. I was eager to learn and I wanted understand in the details the topics I faced. In my Bachelor’s degree program I was enthusiast about low-level programming concepts such as assembly and operating systems. Impatient to learn more and gain a different point of view I applied for a period abroad at the University of Linkoping (Sweden) as an Erasmus Exchange student. When I came back, I was selected to be part of EvoATM, a European Project which aims at optimizing the configuration of Air Traffic Management systems, designing and developing a framework of simulation-based evolutionary computing under the supervision of a Professor of mine. During my Master’s degree I discovered a new interest on data-related topics. I have focused on deep learning models applied to large scale datasets, in particular in the context of biological data. I like developing new models to solve the tasks but also facing the engineering problems caused by the large amount of data. For this reason, I am currently involved in a research project, aiming to bring deep learning models to the study of genomic data.

Purdue CS: What are your future plans in the CS industry?

BB: For the future, I want to pursue a PhD. I really like the research because it allows me to continuously face new problems and it is never repetitive - pushing me to always discover new techniques and ways to improve them. I would like to be part of a research group where I can also be inspired by the people and their work there. At least for now, I think my career will be in academia, doing research, always learning new topics and engaging in innovative studies.

Purdue CS: What are you working on during the GoBoiler Internship?

BB: I will be working with Professor Bruno Ribeiro on a framework that will extend existing theory on graph data. I will learn more on literature and state-of-the-art approaches and I will go beyond that working on the framework. Furthermore, I will also learn about the topics the group is working on, discovering even more how they approach problems and find solutions.

Purdue CS: What influenced you to apply for the GoBoiler Internship?

BB: I discovered the GoBoiler Internship by browsing the Purdue CS website, looking at the active research groups and their main research interest to possibly apply for graduate positions. When I saw that there was the opportunity to work closer to a research group that is focused on the topics that I like the most, I became enthusiast and applied. I started to study the latest papers of the group and I became even more convinced of the value that this experience would have added to my studies.