Year: 2019

A Columbia team has advanced to the world finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). They will go to Porto, Portugal to compete against teams from universities around the world.

Composed of computer science students – Victor Lecomte, Bicheng Gao, and Aditya Shah – the team finished first place at the greater New York regional championship held last November at Manhattan College.

“The teamwork aspect of this competition is really nice,” said Victor Lecomte, a first year MS student who has tried for five years to get into the world finals. “Working together as a team makes the competition even more fun.”

A unique aspect of this programming competition is that teams have five hours to complete ten computational problems with only one computer to use between them. Lecomte shared that their game plan was to get the easiest problems out of the way quickly then figure out which harder problems to tackle. By the end of five hours they had finished eight problems.

Coaches Chengyu Lin and Peilin Zhong helped Team Kington prepare for the regionals by holding weekend training sessions for two months. Through that the team got to know each other and figure out how to best work together. In preparation of the world finals they are headed to Beijing, China for a week-long intensive training camp at the end of February.

The training camp serves as a boot camp with a five-hour contest in the morning, a workshop to review the problems in the afternoon and evenings reserved for even more practice. Participating teams are also regional winners. Teams are ranked so it is much like a real competition. Continued Lecomte, “You can usually figure out who the top teams are and who will likely win in the championship.”

On-campus training sessions are open to everyone that want to sharpen their skills, shared Chengyu Lin, one of the coaches and a third year PhD student. The sessions are also a good way to prepare for potential interview questions as the practice problems are often the same as what Google recruiters ask. Lecomte has been contacted by recruiters because of his involvement in the competition.

“This is challenging work but if you love programming, if you love algorithms, this is definitely a way to improve your coding skills,” said Lin.

The Computing Research Association (CRA) awarded Serina Chang as one of four awardees of the 2019 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Three other computer science students were also nominated, including Ruiqi Zhong, Justin Whitehouse, Hamed Nilforoshan, all of whom received honorable mentions. All four undergraduates were recognized for their work in an area of computing research.

“I am always looking for innovative ways to combine computer science and social science,” said Serina Chang, a senior studying computer science and sociology. “Not only looking at research methods but to have a social impact.”

Chang’s work on detecting emotion in social media, specifically tweets of Chicago gang members, led to a paper in EMNLP ’18. Under the guidance of Professor Kathy Mckeown she also published a paper on automatic text summarization in EACL ’17.

The paper on gang-involved youth in Chicago is one example of how computer science and sociology can intersect. The research continued the work of Desmond Patton, a professor at the School of Social Work and a Data Science Institute member, who found expression of loss over the death of a friend often led to tweets of aggression and real-world violence.

One of their key insights include that domain-specificity and context are extremely important. Interpreting the tweets was also context-critical, as it often depends on the emotional state of the user or what they had been tweeting prior to the current one, and may also refer to context such as the names of rival gangs or deceased friends.

The researchers hypothesized that domain-specificity and context would be important, but were surprised by the degree to which it affected convolutional neural network performance. For example, one set of experiments compared the word embeddings trained on domain-specific unlabeled corpus against word embeddings that trained on other corpora, including standard GloVE and Google News as well as an African-American vernacular English-specific corpus and a location-specific one, which they drew from the same area of Southside Chicago as their users.

The results found that their word embeddings outperformed the others by nearly 4 F1 points, which demonstrates the importance of constructing a large domain-specific corpus instead of resorting to “similar” corpora based on location or demographics. Said Chang, “Our hope is that we can eventually use our system to save critical time, scale their reach, and intervene before more young lives are lost.”

Chang’s thoughtfulness extends into other parts of her life. In her sophomore year she became a teaching assistant so she could work with students in Professor Paul Blaer’s data structures in JAVA course. She worked one-on-one with students to help them with assignments, with the additional goal of building their confidence when it comes to their abilities.

Mentoring others also came hand-in-hand with her involvement in Lean In at Columbia and Womxn in Computer Science (WiCS). In both organizations Chang held a leadership position and made it a point to foster relationships and empower women through various programs that celebrated diversity and feminism.

“I do still have time to study,” laughed Chang when asked about time management. This semester she is focused on working on her thesis. Grad school is also on the horizon and she will make her final decision in April. Part of the CRA award is financial assistance to attend a conference of their choice, she is still unsure of where she wants to go.

Looking back at all she has accomplished while at Columbia makes her feel grateful for all the opportunities she had to work with colleagues and professors, the relationships that have grown with friends and family, and the research that she hopes to continue.

“I am incredibly honored by this award and excited to be recognized for research that I am so passionate about,” said Chang.