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Last week, WiCS excitedly presented its first Lightning Talk, a speaker series featuring student researchers with a focus on supporting traditionally underrepresented groups in CS. The goal of this series is to empower student researchers at Columbia by giving them the opportunity to present their work and share their journeys in research. Additionally, we want this to be a space for all students in CS, especially those who are relatively new to the field, to be exposed to different types of research and learn how CS research is conducted.

Our first Lightning Talk featured speakers Katy Ilonka Gero and Fei-Tzin Lee.

Katy is a second-year PhD student in Computer Science working with Professor Lydia Chilton on co-creative writing systems. She is interested in computational approaches to poetic language, human-machine collaboration, and tools for artists. Katy is also an essayist, poet, and obsessive spider plant breeder. Katy gave us a whirlwind tour of how she ended up in CS through designing custom gluing machines. She also presented her current work at Columbia on metaphor generation and human-computer collaboration.

Fei-Tzin is a third-year PhD student studying natural language processing with Prof. Kathleen McKeown. She has spent the last two years working on the interdisciplinary gang violence project, a collaboration with faculty from the School of Social Work that aims to automatically identify from gang members’ tweets stages at which intervention from a social worker could prevent violence. Fei-Tzin studies dialogue act classification, the identification of “dialogue acts,” or the basic communicative actions or intentions occurring in a conversation. Dialogue act classification is key to automating dialogue understanding and generation. She also discussed the development and automated classification of an annotation scheme for therapy-specific dialogue acts in therapy transcripts.

Bummed you missed this event? Don’t worry! This is just the first of many. We will also hold three more Lightning Talk events throughout this semester, all at 6pm in the CS Lounge:

  • Wednesday, Nov. 7
  • Monday, Nov. 19
  • Tuesday, Dec. 4

We hope to see you at as many as you can make! We also encourage anyone who would like to speak to submit a proposal for consideration. Please message us or email cu-wics-board@lists.cs.columbia.edu if you have any questions. Sign up for our newsletter here and like us on facebook to find out about more events like this!