Flyer

On November 7th, WiCS continued its exciting new series: Lightning Talks! These events feature student researchers with a focus on supporting traditionally underrepresented groups in CS. The goal of our 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 second event of the series featured two amazing guest speakers:

Zixiaofan Yang is a fourth-year PhD student in speech lab working with Prof. Julia Hirschberg. She is interested in paralinguistic properties of speech and has been working on emotion recognition, humor prediction, emotional voice conversion, and incident detection in low-resource languages.

Lightning Talks summary: “I will introduce the problem of speech emotion recognition and discuss the works that we have done, including categorical emotion recognition, cross-language emotion recognition, and predicting continuous emotional dimensions.”

Serina Chang is a senior (undergrad) in Columbia College studying Computer Science and Sociology. (She’s also a member of WiCS!) Her research interests lie at the intersection of her fields, specifically in combining natural language processing (NLP) and social science methods to solve social problems.

Lightning Talks summary: “In my talk, I’ll give an overview of how I’ve crafted an interdisciplinary path in Computer Science and combined it with my passion for Sociology. I’ll go in depth into one of my projects: a collaboration between Prof. Kathy McKeown’s NLP lab and the School of Social Work to automatically detect emotion in social media posts by gang-involved youth.”

Flyer

Thank you Serina and Zixiaofan for coming to our Lightning Talk!

Sad that you missed it? No worries, we have two more lined up! They will be held 6-7 pm in the CS Lounge.

  • 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.

Want to join us for more learning opportunities like this? Sign up for our newsletter here and like us on facebook to find out about more events that empower womxn in CS!