UCLA CS undergraduate student Yu-Hsi (Ellie) Cheng was selected for the Honorable Mention by the Computing Research Association (CRA) for their 2022 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.
Ellie will obtain her B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering in Spring 2022.
At UCLA Ellie has participated in research projects with two different research groups, both related to Artificial Intelligence. First, Ellie worked with Professor Mani Srivastava and members of his Networked and Embedded Systems Laboratory to empirically evaluate different methods of explaining deep neural network models to humans. A paper on this work was published at the top-tier NeurIPS 2020 conference. Second, with the guidance of Professors Todd Millstein and Guy Van den Broeck as well as their former Ph.D. student Steven Holtzen (now an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University), Ellie developed novel compiler optimizations that target improving the efficiency of probabilistic programming languages. A paper on this work was accepted at the 2021 International Conference on Probabilistic Programming, with Ellie as the first author. Additionally, the paper was one of a subset of papers that was allocated a talk slot at the conference.
In conjunction with her extensive research activities, Ellie is also very active in UCLA’s chapter of the Association on Computing Machinery (ACM). Ellie was the Co-President of ACM Cyber from October 2018 – May 2021. Ellie is currently the Dev Team Training Director for ACM Teach LA, which provides computing education to K-12 students in Los Angeles.