Two Undergrads Receive CMNS Alumni Network Summer Awards

Every year, the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) Alumni Network offers summer awards to help undergraduates defray costs related to conducting research, attending conferences or interning. 

Read below how this year’s award recipients plan to further their professional and career development with diverse funding opportunities.

Riya Kumari

Senior computer science major Riya Kumari will be attending the 2023 International Conference on Robotics and Automation in London to present her research with the Perception and Robotics Group, led by Computer Science Professor Yiannis Aloimonos. 

Kumari helped develop WorldGen—an open-source framework to autonomously generate countless structured and unstructured 3D photorealistic scenes such as city view, object collection and object fragmentation along with its rich ground truth annotation data.

“I am really looking forward to meeting other leading researchers in the field and seeing the latest advancements in the robotics and artifical intelligence fields,” Kumari said. “This award was an unexpected and pleasant surprise that will help me cover the costs of attending the conference, which I am extremely grateful for.”

Arya Teymourlouei

Sophomore computer science major Arya Teymourlouei is working in the Neuromotor Control and Learning Laboratory to develop a computational model that classifies varying levels of mental workload.

Mental workload is the number of neural resources involved in completing a task. For example, Teymourlouei said, quiet daydreaming induces less mental workload than taking an exam under pressure.

“I am really looking forward to gaining a stronger understanding of the brain and cognitive processes,” Teymourlouei said. “Computational neuroscience is still a growing field today and we have much to understand. Hopefully, I can make a significant contribution—not just with this project, of course, but in the future too.”

-Story by the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Science