This fall, UNC Computer Science transformed into a hub of technological innovation and collaboration with two major student events: HackNC and the Carolina Data Challenge. These hackathons, led by student teams with department support, brought together more than 700 students from various colleges across North Carolina and beyond.
Professor Mohit Bansal earned the IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, conferred annually to two alumni under 40 years old who have contributed significantly to achieve exemplary recognition and distinction in their careers. IIT Kanpur is one of the most prestigious academic institutions in India, and thousands of its alumni are eligible for the award.
In this exclusive interview, new professor Richard Marks reflects on the strategies he has developed over decades in the tech industry and offers a glimpse into the future of generative AI as well as what he hopes to bring to computer science education.
Branch-Solve-Merge (BSM) is a program for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex natural language tasks. BSM includes branching, solving, and merging modules to plan, crack, and combine sub-tasks. Applied to LLM response evaluation and constrained text generation with several models, BSM boosts human-LLM agreement, reduces biases, and enables LLaMA-2-chat to match or surpass GPT-4 in most domains.
Assistant Professor Junier Oliva received a two-year NSF grant to improve the ability of machine learning models to extrapolate beyond the scope of their training dataset. The project will hopefully enhance scientific tasks across numerous disciplines, including chemical discovery and safety assessment.
Inbar Fried, Janine Hoelscher, and Ron Alterovitz received a Best Poster Award during the Data vs Model in Medical Robotics workshop held at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). The award was only awarded to two posters submitted to the workshop.
Associate Professor Cynthia Sturton received two NSF grants to bolster hardware security verification. Both projects represent multi-institutional collaborations with broad applications.
UNC Computer Science Department invites all alumni, current UNC students, faculty and staff to connect with each other through the new virtual networking community, CS Career Connections via Heels Engage.
A team of researchers and physicians led by Professor Ron Alterovitz has demonstrated, for the first time, a robotic needle capable of autonomously maneuvering through intricate lung tissue while avoiding obstacles and important lung structures.
Junier Oliva and Alexander Tropsha received at two-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a new project, “Extrapolative Analyses for Reliable Machine Learning Driven Scientific Discovery”, the goal of which is to give machines the ability to introspectively assess training set limitations and either address them or alert human users. The project will directly impact the drug discovery process.
