{"id":53,"date":"2020-04-28T19:50:24","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T19:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/?p=17"},"modified":"2020-05-07T19:19:41","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T19:19:41","slug":"cs-students-win-best-paper-honors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/cs-students-win-best-paper-honors\/","title":{"rendered":"CS Students Win Best Paper Honors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students work alongside faculty as colleagues, investigating open-ended questions, producing world-class research, presenting findings at national conferences and, sometimes, winning honors for their work.<\/p>\n

\"An
An Nguyen \u201922<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Student:<\/strong> An Nguyen \u201922
\nProfessor and co-author:<\/strong> Colleen Lewis
\nOrganization:<\/strong> SIGCSE 2020 Technical Symposium
\nPaper:<\/strong> \u201cCompetitive Enrollment Policies in Computing Departments Negatively Predict First-Year Students\u2019 Sense of Belonging, Self- Efficacy, and Perception of Department\u201d (Award for Best Paper\/CS education research track)<\/p>\n

Nguyen explains:<\/strong> \u201cTo identify relationships between those policies and students\u2019 experiences, we linked survey data from 1,245 first-year students in 80 CS departments to a dataset of department policies. We found that competitive enrollment negatively predicts first-year students\u2019 perception of the computing department as welcoming, their sense of belonging and their self-efficacy in computing. Both belonging and self-efficacy are known predictors of student retention in CS. In addition, these relationships are stronger for students without pre-college computing experience. Our classification of institutions as competitive is conservative, and false positives are likely. This biases our results and suggests that the negative relationships we found are an underestimation of the effects of competitive enrollment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Julius
Julius Lauw \u201920<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Students:<\/strong> Julius Lauw \u201920, Dominique Macias \u201919, Akshay Trikha \u201921 and Julia Vendemiatti \u201921 (computer science)
\nProfessor and co-author:<\/strong> George Monta\u00f1ez Organization: 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
\nPaper:<\/strong> \u201cThe Bias-Expressivity Trade-off\u201d (Best Paper; ICAART 2020 had just a 16% acceptance rate for full papers. The Best Paper award is the first for Monta\u00f1ez\u2019s research lab at Harvey Mudd and his fifth conference award overall.)<\/p>\n

On behalf of the team, Lauw explains:<\/strong> \u201cOne of the strongest driving forces of this research is our team\u2019s goal to formalize the theory of overfitting and underfitting in machine learning problems. The first step in achieving this target is to design a theoretical framework that allows us to derive bounds on the expressivity of machine learning algorithms. By justifying that there is an inherent trade-off between the expressivity and the amount of bias induced in a machine learning algorithm in this paper, we could potentially use this framework to estimate the expressivity of machine learning algorithms based on the amount of bias induced in the algorithm itself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students work alongside faculty as colleagues, investigating open-ended questions, producing world-class research, presenting findings at national conferences and, sometimes, winning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-student-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}