collage of headshot of awardees

This past Friday, June 10th, the Computer Science department honored it's most remarkable Undergraduate students for their excellent mentorship services, ambitious academic achievements, and exceptional research contributions at the 2022 CS Award Ceremony. Read on to learn more about the awardees and their accomplishments. 

Computer Science Student of the Year

Sophie Groenwold (Advisor: William Wang)

This award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding leadership, excellence in academics and research, as well as performing “above and beyond the call of duty” when engaging with students and the CS community.

As well as being a Regents Scholar and Engineering Honors student, Sophie serves as the President of Society of Women Engineers and a CS Undergrad Learning Assistant. In addition, Sophie is involved in the Research Scholar Program, NLP Research Lab, and CS Undergrad Affairs Committee.

Computer Science Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

Chaofan Shou (Advisors: Tevfik Bultan and Arpit Gupta)

This award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding contributions, and sustained commitment and excellence in research contributions. 

Chaofan investigated looking for vulnerabilities in browser security policies using fuzzing. His research was published as a lead-author paper in ASE 2021 and he will be joining UC Berkeley for their PhD program in the Fall.

Computer Science Undergraduate Research Recognition of Excellence

Alex Mei (Advisor: William Wang)

This award is presented annually in recognition of excellence in research contributions. 

Alex investigated PureText, a simple yet effective precision-driven sentence filtering layer that learns to remove low-quality sentences in texts to improve existing summarization models

Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Researcher Awards

This prestigious award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. This year,  two UCSB CS students received recognition.

Aesha Parekh, Finalist (Advisor: William Wang)

Aesha was the 3rd UCSB student finalist in the 22-year history of the CRA award. Her research analyzed how gender and seniority bias were manifested in text generated by natural language models.

Samhita Honnavalli, Honorable Mention (Advisor: William Wang)

Phi Beta Kappa Society

Ishana Narayanan (CS & Stats Double-Major)

Established in 1776, the Phi Beta Kappa Society is the nation's oldest and most respected scholastic organization in North America. Election is by invitation only to 1% of graduating seniors nationwide in recognition of high achievement across an interdisciplinary array of demanding courses within the classic liberal arts. 

Computer Science Outstanding Mentor Award

This award is given in recognition of outstanding and sustained teaching and mentorship. This year, there are two awardees.

Surya Pugal

Yuval Steinhart

Congratulations and thank you for your hard work!

CS Capstone Project

Best Project: SmartGrid

Partner: AgMonitor

Team: Kaiwen Li (Lead), Jayden Yu, Yuyuan Wang, Alex Mei, Jasun Chen

Project Overview: build a pipeline to clean & aggregate energy data streams, in order to create an application that will store & visualize energy data, and implement a real-time algorithmic system that can effectively manage energy assets & optimize energy costs.