Diversity: Undergraduate/Minorities Research
As we know, minorities (female, black, Latino, etc.) students are usually less willing to continue research, specially in engineering area. I believe this problems starts from undergraduate level where students do not find equal chance and encouragement for research. During my Ph.D., I tried my best to mentored students with different nationalities, colors, backgrounds, and even different departments (ECE, CS). I highly encouraged my students to participate in the research during their undergraduate program. I was involved in various undergraduate research programs, e.g., ERSP and ENLANCE, where I directly mentored over 22 undergraduate students. I have published several papers with undergraduate and underrepresented minority (URM) students. I have Published with 21 individual undergraduate and 15 individual URM students. As a result of his encouragement, six of my mentees decided to continue to graduate program in top schools including UC San Diego, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania, and University of Chicago. In addition, after graduation, over 14 of my students joined top industries such as Intel, Amazon, Google, and Apple.
Minorities Program
I have volunteered to participate in ESRP (Early Research Scholarship Program) two consecutive years which aims to support undergraduate research at UC San Diego. Through this program, I mentored a team of undergraduate students (majority female students) in their second year of the program. Students learn about research in computer science and then propose and carry out an independent research project over the course of an academic year. More info can be found here.
2017-2018: Students: Joyaan Bhesania, Robert Koepp, Val Gonzalez, Helen Shu Project: Brain-inspired computing and machine learning acceleration on GPU Publications: M. Imani, J. Morris*, H. Shu*, J. Bhesania*, T. Rosing, " Efficient Associative Search in Brain-inspired Hyperdimensional Computing", submitted to IEEE Design & Test, 2019. (* undergraduate students) 2018-2019: students: Roshan Fernando, Leyi (Sherry) Shang Project: Online emotion detection using Hyperdimensional computing |
I participated in the ENLACE program two consecutive years. ENLANCE is a bi-national summer research program at UC San Diego aims to encourage the participation of high school and college students in research, while promoting cross-border friendships in the Baja California/San Diego region. This program helps Latino students to spend a six weeks of their summer at UCSD, learning and participate on the research.
2017-2018: Students: Angel Torres mota, Claudia Lopez (High school Latino students) Project: Design of a line detection robots from scratch (Mentor: Micheal Ostertag). 2018-2019: students: Adrian Chouza, Sebastian Silva Project: Hyperdimensional computing for energy efficient classification |
On MediaOur mentorship of undergraduate Mexican students are projected in both UC San Diego TV and CSE department TV. The following video show my contribution on ENLANCE/SIMS program and how we mentor students to learn and contribute on the research.
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