Award Abstract # 2243941
REU Site: Exploring the Limits of Intelligent Systems

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
Initial Amendment Date: March 7, 2023
Latest Amendment Date: February 28, 2024
Award Number: 2243941
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Vladimir Pavlovic
vpavlovi@nsf.gov
 (703)292-8318
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: May 1, 2023
End Date: April 30, 2026 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $393,470.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $400,097.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2023 = $393,470.00
FY 2024 = $6,627.00
History of Investigator:
  • Alexandra Schofield (Principal Investigator)
    xanda@cs.hmc.edu
  • George Montanez (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Harvey Mudd College
301 PLATT BLVD
CLAREMONT
CA  US  91711-5901
(909)621-8121
Sponsor Congressional District: 28
Primary Place of Performance: Harvey Mudd College
301 PLATT BLVD
CLAREMONT
CA  US  91711-5901
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
28
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): C76JKA5JY2B3
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): RSCH EXPER FOR UNDERGRAD SITES
Primary Program Source: 01002324DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002425DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 9102, 9250
Program Element Code(s): 113900
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

REU Site: Exploring the Limits of Intelligent Systems (#2243941)

As machine learning and AI systems become ever more common, encroaching on every aspect of society, the need for understanding the systems and their fundamental limitations becomes even more pressing. This project promotes the progress of science and supports education and diversity by training undergraduate students to research questions on the limits of intelligent systems. It builds a cohort of undergraduate students who can develop research ability, presentation skills, and further interest in research-related computing careers. The project focuses on understanding the boundaries in what intelligent systems can achieve both theoretically and in complex real-world scenarios with non-expert users. By educating undergraduate students to probe and understand the limits of these systems, the project helps build an empowered citizenry capable of grappling with the complex ethical and social issues these systems present.

Through this award, students will work on cutting-edge subprojects in computer vision, programming language analysis and synthesis, human-robot interaction, and information-theoretic understanding of machine learning systems. These research topics give students valuable academic and industry skills that extend beyond current AI models and frameworks towards the broader reaches of what computing may achieve in the future. The topics for this project are designed to be modular and hierarchical to enable successful undergraduate research milestones. Students will be housed at Harvey Mudd College, an undergraduate-only institution, and experience the most compelling aspects of a graduate school environment during a ten-week summer program. Students will actively engage with the entire research process, from literature search, to articulating problems of interest, to investigations of specific pieces of these problems, and focusing results for presentation and publication.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Hollingsworth, Ket and Nian, Sean and Gutierrez, Alan and Padmanabhan, Arthi "An Analysis of Network Overhead in Distributed TinyML" , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1109/SEC62691.2024.00051 Citation Details
Knell, Milo and Rane, Sahil and Bicker, Forrest and Che, Tiger and Wu, Alan and Montañez, George "From Targets to Rewards: Continuous Target Sets in the Algorithmic Search Framework" Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART , v.3 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.5220/0012370600003636 Citation Details
Pang-Naylor, Kerria and Li, Ian and Rajesh, Kishore and Montañez, George D "Probabilistic Error Guarantees for Abductive Inference" , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1109/FMLDS63805.2024.00038 Citation Details
Schofield, Alexandra and Wu, Siqi and Bayard_de_Volo, Theo and Kuze, Tatsuki and Gomez, Alfredo and Sultana, Sharifa ""My Very Subjective Human Interpretation": Domain Expert Perspectives on Navigating the Text Analysis Loop for Topic Models" Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - GROUP , v.9 , 2025 https://doi.org/10.1145/3701201 Citation Details

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