Neville, Kancharla, and Robles-Granda Receive CSoI Grants
11-01-2012
The Center for Science of Information (CSoI) has awarded student collaborative seed grants to four project teams of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty advisors. Jennifer Neville, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, advises students on two of the selected project teams.
Neville's advisee, CS graduate student Pablo Robles-Granda, is a student principal investigator on the project "Investigation of Metabolic Phenomena Using Information Theory" - a collaboration with graduate students in Chemical Engineering (Frank DeVilbiss) and statistics (Mohan Gopaladesikan). Faculty advisors for the project are D. Ramkrishna (Chemical Engineering) and Maxim Raginsky (Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois).
CS graduate student Suvidha Kancharla, another advisee of Neville's, is a student principal investigator on the project "Graph Inference based on Random Walks" along with Victoria Kostina (a graduate student in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University) and Thomas Courtade (a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University). Jennifer Neville is the faculty advisor for this project.
"The seed grants RFP resulted in students from seven institutions collectively developing proposals," notes Brent Ladd, director of education for the CSoI. "Such an experience increases the capacity of these students and postdoctoral scholars to formulate their ideas in terms of problem statements, plan of action, literature review, expected outcomes, and accountability through reporting, mentorship, and peer involvement. Perhaps the largest benefit will be the experience and challenge of working in interdisciplinary teams."
The teams will present overviews of their project plans to their peers during a student research workshop at 10:00 a.m. December 3, 2012 in Lawson Computer Science Building (LWSN), Room 3102 A/B.
On December 4, a keynote presentation will be given by David Tse, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Tse will speak on the emerging field of the science of information and its connection with life sciences at 2:00 p.m. in LWSN 1142. A research poster session will follow at 3:00 p.m. in the LWN Commons. The keynote and poster session are open to the public.
A National Science Foundation science and technology center, the Center for Science of Information is based at Purdue and has nine university partners in the U.S. Purdue and its partners support the center's mission of advancing science and technology through a new quantitative understanding of the representation, communication and processing of information in biological, physical, social, and engineered systems. The CSoI's director is Saul Rosen Professor of Computer Science Wojciech Szpankowski.