"Never miss an opportunity to present your research."

I was advised of this (by @phonedude_mln) while a PhD student. On May 28, 2024, the Drexel CCI Doctoral Student Association (DSA) held the First Annual Research Showcase, which invited students, faculty, and others in the college to present and witness ongoing research by any students or faculty that opted to present.

I opted to present.

I have reiterated the advice that started this post to my PhD, Hyung Wook Choi, who also opted to present.

This post is a summary of this brief event.

The Event

The event commenced at 4 pm on the 10th floor of Drexel CCI in Philadelphia. The event was composed of about a dozen student posters and a series of 8 5-minute lightning talks at 5 pm following the poster session.

Poster Session

Attendees were able to walk around with refreshments for the first hour of the event and inquire about students’ research as presented on the posters. I was able to visit a few of the posters and for some, talk with the students, to get a sense of what they were exploring in their studies.

Layla Bouzoubaa (@Bouzoulay) presented, “Stigma: Classified Contextualized Encounters”, a work-in-progress project that looks into the notion of stigma concerning drug use on online forums like various sub-Reddits.

Steve Earth provided a poster correlating the ability of students to write proofs with prior experience in math and programming courses.

Sonia Pascua (@sony_d_gr8t) showed her work that explores Dr. Weimao Ke’s (@keweimao) DLITE formulation model for information representation and knowledge organization.

Katie Zellner (@katzellnerd) presented her work with Dr. Aleksandra Sarcevic on the effectiveness of physical user interfaces in simulated medical settings.

Aria Pessianzadeh (@apessianIU) presented his work investigating a more refined stance model for controversial topics like Affirmative Action as reflected in Reddit comments. He anticipated his model to be generally applicable to other controversial topics discussed in online discourse.

Lu Wang’s poster described her research in detecting biases in large language models (LLMs), how to measure them, and how to mitigate them.

Matt Namvarpour showed his work focusing on the roles that technology companies play in children’s online safety.

Abass Ahmed (@unbent_) presented his poster exploring the current state of immigrant support in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.

Lightning Talks

Following the poster session in the first hour of the event were a series of 5-minute lightning talks.

Steve Earth (who also presented a poster) further elaborated on his exploration of skill transfer between programming education and proofwriting proficiency.

My PhD student, Hyung Wook Choi, described her research exploring the semantic evolution of terms between domains and prior approaches that have attempted to solve similar problems.

Edward Kim (@edk208) described his work on adding a “prefrontal cortex” to mitigate harms, essentially (sic) lobotomizing them.

Shadi Rezapour (@shadi_rezapour) talked about her work on integrating methods of exploring online interaction to enhance socially aware models.

I (Mat Kelly, @machawk1) presented a summary of my research on complex information retrieval tasks for web archives in dimensions beyond time (slides available below).

Afsaneh Razi (@Afsaneh_Razi) talked about her recently presented papers at CHI’24 discussing how teens perceive personalized content online and whether they preferred the advice of trained counselors for dire situations over the advice of AI-generated responses.

Sonia Pascua (who also had a poster) went into further detail about her dissertation research on the DLITE methods for information retrieval, particularly on how it compared to other metrics.

Closing and Acknowledgement

After Sonia’s presentation and a slight pause to socialize, awards were presented to the three best posters, as evaluated by a panel of three judges.

Overall, the First Annual Research Showcase put on by Drexel CCI’s Doctoral Student Association was a great chance to hear about students’ and faculty’s ongoing research as well as to get together in an informal setting to socialize with our CCI peers. I look forward to the DSA putting on this event again in 2025. A special thanks goes to Layla Bouzoubaa for organizing the event.

---

EDIT: Also, a special thanks to John Kunze (@jakkbl) for reporting some typos in this post after publication. They have since been corrected.

---