10/18/2017 Samantha Hendon, CS @ ILLINOIS 5 min read
Written by Samantha Hendon, CS @ ILLINOIS
Five exceptional CS @ ILLINOIS master’s students have been recognized for their outstanding academic achievements and leadership, each receiving $35,000 during their final year of study.
Meet the Siebel Scholars Class of 2018:
Jake BaileyJake has been an intern at tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Beyond CS education, he’s passionate about programming languages, including design, implementation, compilation, and the effect languages have on the software development process itself.
Milica Hadzi-Tanovic, a MS computer science student, is actively engaged in a variety of research groups in the department. She is working with Professor Darko Marinov in software testing (test selection and test prioritization), Professor Grigore Rosu on monitoring test executions, and Professor Kevin Chang on natural language processing.
Milica received her bachelor’s degree from the University of San Francisco (USF) in 2015 where she graduated at the top of her class. While at USF, she worked as a teacher assistant for various classes. After graduation, she completed a six-month internship at FIS in Belgrade where she worked on developing a new software for banks that operate at the stock market. She also worked for a startup Polysome.io based in San Francisco where she developed encryption systems for a new peer-to-peer file sharing network.
Sujay KhandekarSujay has experience in design mining for Android apps, where designers explore an automatically-generated collection of design patterns across a variety of Android apps. He is currently working to understand modern-day communication methods by examining the effects of rich media such as emojis, stickers, photos, and video. Last semester, he was named a 2017 Knight of St. Patrick and has thoroughly enjoyed his engagement with a variety of CS @ ILLINOIS student groups by holding leadership roles with ACM, Reflections | Projections, HackIllinois, and Women in Computer Science.
Unnat is a MS student in computer science and focused on applications of Machine Learning to image-based text generation, autonomous driving and reinforcement learning. His work with Professor Alexander Schwing - ‘Generating Diverse Questions using Variational Autoencoders’, was accepted as a spotlight at CVPR 2017. His work on visual place recognition was accepted at Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) 2017 as an oral presentation. He has worked as an intern at Uber’s Self Driving Project, Fresh Gravity, UMass Amherst, Deutsche Bank, and KPMG.
Prior to joining Illinois, Unnat graduated with the Director’s Gold Medal from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He was also awarded Cadence Gold Medal for best research thesis across all engineering departments. He led a social initiatives team at IIT Kanpur and contributed to creating an innovative gamified-aid for children with intellectual disability.
Jayasi Mehar
Congratulations to all of our Siebel Scholars!
About Siebel Scholars: Siebel Scholars are examining some of today’s most pressing problems and advancing on solutions. The principles underlying Siebel Scholars’ efforts are social responsibility, entrepreneurship, and lifelong community. The program was established in 2000 by the Thomas (BA History ’75, MBA ’83, MS CS ’85) and Stacey Siebel Foundation to recognize the most talented students in the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, bioengineering, and energy science. Each year, more than 90 graduate students at the top of their class are selected.