Research Experiences for Undergraduates

MDI and the Computer Science Department are co-hosting a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site. This REU site aims not only to teach students about computer science research but also to help them understand how researchers in other disciplines use computer science algorithms and analytic tools to generate evidence for developing public policy.


Summer 2025 REU Cohort

This cohort of students will focus on modeling opinion as it relates to different firearm-related policies and events of the day. It is possible to work on stance detection using social media posts (Kawintiranon & Singh, 2021), and with the recent advancements in generative AI, this type of detection may be less costly with respect to manual data labeling. Therefore, this cohort will use a combination of generated training data, relevant public document data, and auxiliary data to improve opinion detection without labeling more data. Example auxiliary sources include public reviews, images, and network knowledge.

REU Students

Imani Allah

Swarthmore College ’26

Camden Baucom

Georgetown University ’26

Jelani Beaugris

Rutgers University New Brunswick ’27

Chloe Bogen

University of Washington ’26

Rylee Brown

University of Florida ’27

John Cheek

The University of Tennessee Knoxville ’27

Kathleen Higgins

University of Delaware ’27

Erin Kendall

Transylvania University ’26

Charlie Prince

Case Western Reserve University ’27

Unzila Sakina

Duke University ’26

Riley Stacy

Barnard College ’27

Sultana Yeasmin

Columbia University in the City of New York ’27

REU Faculty Mentors

Shweta Bansal

Professor

Sarah Bargal

Assistant Professor

Lisa Singh

Director, Massive Data Institute
Sonneborn Chair | Chair and Professor, Department of Computer Science | Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy