Each year, the Computing Research Association recognizes stellar undergraduate students throughout North America in its Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards program. This year, three UW CSE students – Krittika D’Silva, Darby Losey and Daryl Zuniga – were cited by CRA for excellence in research as part of its 2016 competition.
Krittika D’Silva, who was named a finalist by CRA, is completing a double major in computer engineering and bioengineering. She worked with the late professor Gaetano Borriello and Ph.D. alum Nicki Dell in UW CSE’s ICTD Lab, where she developed hands-free smartphone technology for use by health care providers in low-resource settings. D’Silva also worked on the CGNet Swara app for Android. The app, which leveraged a popular interactive voice forum in India to enable citizen journalism in remote areas, was featured in National Geographic. Currently, she works with Luis Ceze researching ways in which DNA molecules can be used for long-term data storage – read a recent New York Times article on this work here, and listen to a KUOW interview withi Ceze here.
Darby Losey and Daryl Zuniga each received honorable mentions. Losey is an honors candidate in computer science and neurobiology. He works with UW CSE professor Raj Rao on the development of non-invasive brain-computer interfaces. Zuniga, who is co-advised by Dan Grossman and Zach Tatlock in UW CSE’s Programming Languages & Software Engineering group, is working on verifying peephole optimizations for compilers.
In the past 10 years, the University of Washington has had 28 students recognized in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards competition – more than any other school. Princeton is nipping at our heels with 27, followed by Cornell (23), Harvey Mudd (22), UC Berkeley (19), the University of Virginia (19), Harvard (17), the University of Illinois (16), and Carnegie Mellon (15). Find more information on the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards here.
Congratulations, Krittika, Darby and Daryl – you make UW CSE proud!