Sana Madhavan

Year in School
Senior

Major
CS + Linguistics

Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence Computers and Education Interactive Computing

Research Mentor
Dr. Julia Hockenmaier

Research/Engagement Experience
Through my time being an event lead for the NCWIT (National Center for Women in Information Technology) Aspirations Awards Reception, I participated in the ideation of the event from the initial logistics to its completion. I also spoke in a panel of CS STARS to the high school award recipients to ensure that they feel welcomed into a support network of women in computing as they pursue education after high school. As a Women in Engineering lead orientation mentor for CS+X, I led sessions on different aspects of the University, and I made sure all the incoming students felt included. I also was the content co-chair of Reflections | Projections, the largest student-run tech conference in the Midwest, and successfully brought speakers to campus to give talks to 2500+ attendees. On the research side, I was the first researcher in Dr. Girju's NLP project on the language in Mindfulness Meditation scripts. I performed an unsupervised Machine Learning approach called topic modeling to group the corpora into topics and then performed statistical analysis as well. Currently, I am researching conversational dialogue and how clearly a model can build a Minecraft structure based on that.

Interests
Natural Language Processing, AI, Affective Computing

Project Title
Collaborative Construction and Communication in Minecraft

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
My unwavering aspiration to connect the world and enable self-expression through language began in my childhood. I always strove to understand the intricacies of language, whether it is through syntax, semantics, emotion conveyed or more, and to harness technology to capture and amplify language’s power at a large scale. Since high school, I knew I wanted to combine linguistics with computing to build language processing technologies in my academic and professional career. My personal driving factor was the language and dialect barrier among my grandparents in India and I, which inspired me to pursue higher education in computational linguistics to bridge the gap of distance. This was all before large language models swept the technical space, and now it is even more urgent a matter to keep innovating.

What social interests matter to me?
With so much injustice, obstacles, and plights collectively felt everywhere in the world, racial inequality is an issue that I resonate with, as well as gender inequality. I also believe equal access to education is essential for a developing world.

What is my most impactful college experience?
My most impactful college experience has actually been as a CS STAR. I enjoyed speaking directly to middle and high school students to inspire them to pursue computing as part of NCWIT Aspirations outreach and signing up for prospective student events, where I often met students and their parents, gave them tours, and answered any questions they had to help them see themselves in CS+X programs. The program has a high potential for impact, and I'm glad I was a part of it for most of college.

These are a few of my favorite things!
All things Taylor Swift, Writing, Music, Baking, Ice Cream

Research Description
The aim of this project in Conversational AI/Natural Language Processing is to develop interactive agents that can communicate with humans to collaboratively solve tasks in grounded scenarios. The machine architect should have generated utterances based on human dialogue, and output a model that best fits the human's gold standard structure.

Biography
I am a senior studying Computer Science and Linguistics at Illinois from Barrington, Illinois, and previously in the suburbs of Seattle. I am passionate about the intersection of language and technology, as well as the social impact through technology. My campus involvements include being a CS STAR in the past two school years, a chair of the Computer Science Mental Health Committee, the CS+X department lead for Women in Engineering First-Year Orientation, the professional chair of a professional engineering sorority, technical committee involvement with Women in CS, and most recently the Content co-chair of Reflections | Projections. I hope to continue towards Natural Language Processing in graduate school as my core computer science coursework merges with the linguistics side. I am also passionate about teaching and held positions in the course staff of CS 225: Data Structures and CS 124: Computer Science I. I hope to pursue higher education in the future in computational linguistics and/or go into industry in the NLP space.