Flyer

On Nov 19th, WiCS presented the third event of its new series, Lightning Talks. The goal of this series is empowering 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.

For our third Lightning Talk, we welcomed Payal Chandak and Mariel Werner.

Payal Chandak is a sophomore (undergrad) in Columbia College studying Neuroscience and Computer Science. She is working on data-driven pharmacovigilance research with professor Nicholas Tatonetti in the department of biomedical informatics. In her talk, she will be presenting her research on identifying drugs posing increased risk of adverse reactions to women using data-mining approaches. She will also discuss her experience in developing the project and the gains and challenges of diving into research as a freshman with absolutely no prior knowledge.

Mariel Werner is a visiting graduate student taking classes and doing research at Columbia while finishing a dual masters at Juilliard in cello and piano performance. In her talk, she will be discussing two machine-learning based research projects. The first project involves using statistical models to predict prosody content of written text (with the ultimate goal of simulating natural-sounding speech); the second project uses convolutional neural networks to classify phenotypes of tissue cells in brightfield images.

Thank you Payal and Mariel for coming to tell us about your research experiences!

We have one more Lightning Talk left this semester! It will be on 12/4 from 6-7 pm in the CS Lounge. Don’t miss it! Stay tuned for our other events by singing up for our newsletter here and liking us on facebook!