During its annual awards ceremony, the Department of Computer Science celebrated its brightest minds, recognizing exceptional undergraduate students’ academic achievements, research, innovation, teaching, and leadership.
Outstanding Academic Achievement was awarded to students who consistently demonstrated excellence across their coursework, maintaining top GPAs while tackling some of the program鈥檚 most challenging classes. Faculty praised their discipline, curiosity, and dedication to mastering complex concepts. This year鈥檚 recipients were Abby Pitcarin and Ben Gaudreau.
罢丑别听Outstanding Undergraduate Research Excellence聽award went to聽James Gore, recognizing his significant contributions to faculty-led and independent research projects. James used Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for the challenging task of art retrieval, where the goal is to match textual descriptions with relevant artworks. By fine-tuning two retrieval models, Long-CLIP and BLIP, on both human-annotated and MLLM-generated captions, the study finds that MLLM-generated captions can yield comparable retrieval performance to human annotations.
Ethan Gilles聽received the聽Innovation and Creativity聽award for developing original projects and novel approaches. Whether through building open-source tools, launching startups, or crafting imaginative applications, recipients of this award showcase the limitless potential of creative thinking in tech.
Ethan was also recognized with the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award, which honors students who go above and beyond to support their peers. These individuals play a crucial role in helping others succeed by hosting review sessions, mentoring classmates, and making complex topics more accessible and engaging.
Finally, the聽Rising Stars聽award recognized聽Colby Wirth听补苍诲听Mandy Ho聽for showing exceptional promise in their academic journeys. With strong performance, enthusiasm for learning, and growing involvement in the department, they are poised to become future leaders in the field.
Faculty, family, and peers gathered to celebrate the recipients鈥� accomplishments, offering a powerful reminder of the talent, drive, and passion within the computer science community.
