Four Ph.D. Students Receive the UMD Graduate Student Research Fellowship for Summer 2020

Ph.D. students Rohan Chandra, Kanishka Ganguly, Kamal Gupta and Kevin Hogan receive the UMD Graduate Student Research Fellowship for summer 2020.

Rohan Chandra (Advisor- Dinesh Manocha)

Chandra earned his bachelors in electronics engineering from Delhi Technological University, New Delhi, India, and his master’s in computer science from UMD in 2018.

His research work focuses on socially acceptable autonomous driving and aims to develop a new metric that can be used to "measure" social behavior. “While most of the current focus on AVs in both industry and academia is on their safe and proper functioning, not much research is being done with respect to an AV's social behavior,” said Chandra. "Socially Acceptable" autonomous driving is when an AV integrates into the normal flow of traffic without upsetting or frustrating human drivers, he explained. Chandra plans to implement new "socially acceptable" navigation policies based on reinforcement learning and the social behavior metric.

Kanishka Ganguly  (Advisor- Yiannis Aloimonos)

 An undergraduate in computer science from the Birla Institute of Technology, India and master’s in engineering in Robotics from UMD, Ganguly’s research focuses on robotic grasping, using high degree-of-freedom grippers such as the Shadow Dexterous Hand and 3D computer vision. Ganguly plans to develop robust and repeatable algorithms for controlling the Shadow Dexterous Hand and manipulating objects in a scene using purely tactile feedback, as well as integrating a 3D vision pipeline for a tighter visuo-motor control loop.

Kamal Gupta (Advisors- Abhinav Shrivastava and Larry Davis)

An undergraduate and master’s in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India, Gupta’s research aims at understanding and synthesizing the 3-dimensional visual world with computational tools. “The core objective of my research is to enable the storytellers - poets, teachers or entrepreneurs to create 3D visual content with intricate details seamlessly,” said Gupta. He plans to further his research in building core algorithms and tools for this goal.

Kevin Hogan (Advisor- James Purtilo)

An undergraduate in Computer Engineering from UMD, Hogan’s research interests are focused towards software engineering, programming languages and security. A member of the software engineering at Maryland (SEAM) lab, Hogan currently works on novel techniques for supporting human collaboration and decision-making with technology. He plans to spend his summer extending SEAM's homegrown collaboration system, Decidio, to support "virtual moderators" that will automatically promote fairness in the interactions between human collaborators.

The Summer Research Fellowships support the doctoral students to devote a summer of focused work to prepare for or complete a benchmark in their program.

All four awardees will receive a stipend of $5,000, shared equally by the Graduate School and the department/graduate program.