Four ECE ILLINOIS students receive Beckman awards

5/11/2018 Joseph Park, ECE ILLINOIS

PhD students Wei Han and Xuesong Yang, PhD candidate Ding Liu, and undergraduate Madison Wilson were among this year's recipients.

Written by Joseph Park, ECE ILLINOIS

Fifteen students were recently named recipients of the 2018 Beckman Institute student awards, including four students from ECE ILLINOIS.

PhD student [profile:weihan3] and PhD candidate [profile:dingliu2] were both chosen to receive the Thomas and Margaret Huang Award for Graduate Research. The fund was established by the Huang family and their friends and colleagues to honor their contribution to science, technology, and society. The fund gives awards to graduate students who are researching in the field of human-computer intelligent interaction at the Beckman Institute.

Han plans to investigate the problem of designing compact neural network models, provide a unified understanding of the existing empirically proved model selection strategies, and demonstrate new principles for designing parameter-efficient models. Liu will be focusing his research on connecting low-level image processing and high-level vision through deep learning. Both will be working with their adviser, ECE ILLINOIS Research Professor [profile:t-huang1] who is also the founder of the Image Formation and Processing Group. Huang is also affiliated with the CSL and the Beckman Institute.

Madison Wilson received the Beckman Institute Undergraduate Fellowship which offers students the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary research at the institute during the summer thanks to funding from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. Wilson is working towards a dual degree in electrical engineering and behavioral neuroscience psychology and plans to perform computational analysis and automation of neural metabolic interactions between neurons and glial cells. She will be working in the Biophotonics lab with ECE ILLINOIS Professor [profile:boppart] and Beckman Institute Graduate Fellow [profile:bower3], who is pursuing a PhD in ECE.

[profile:xyang45] received the Neurotechnology for Memory and Cognition Awards. Supported by funding from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, the award offers one graduate student and one undergraduate student the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary research in neuroscience and technology development at the Beckman Institute during the summer. Yang is pursuing his PhD in informatics, a multidisciplinary program with electrical and computer engineering, linguistics, and cognitive science. He will be working with ECE ILLINOIS Professor [profile:jhasegaw] who also leads the Statistical Speech Technology Group.

 

Read the full list of winners on the Beckman Institute website.


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This story was published May 11, 2018.