In May 2023, two doctoral students in the Department of Computer Science were awarded the Catacosinos Fellowship for Excellence in Computer Science. After a rigorous selection process, students Harsh Trivedi and Xiaoling Hu were awarded the fellowships in recognition of their contributions in the field of computer science.
The Catacosinos family, founders of the fellowship, generously provided computer science students with this opportunity through an endowment, i.e. Catacosinos Fellowship Fund, which started in 1978. Each of this year’s Fellows received $5,000 to support their educational and research related pursuits. Candidates were nominated by faculty members and a committee reviewed their application packages which included their research statement and vision, publications, and CV.
Harsh Trivedi, 2023 Catacosinos Fellow
Harsh Trivedi started his time at Stony Brook University (SBU) by obtaining his masters and is currently pursuing a PhD in computer science. Trivedi has been an exceptional graduate student with a stellar academic and research record in Natural Language Processing (NLP). With a research focus in multi-step reasoning, question answering, and robustness & generalization, Trivedi has made multiple impactful and timely contributions in NLP and expanding LLM capabilities.
Trivedi has published several papers in top NLP conferences with his advisor, Professor Niranjan Balasubramanian. “I am constantly amazed by Harsh’s uncanny ability to abstract away details from messy problems, formalize and reason about them effectively.” said Balasubramanian.
This fellowship will support Trivedi in furthering his exciting research.
Xiaoling Hu, 2023 Catacosinos Fellow
Xiaoling Hu began his academic career by obtaining a B.S. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and a M.S. from Tsinghua University. Hu’s research interests lie in the intersection of medical imaging, computer vision, and machine learning. In particular, Hu's research endeavors integrate mathematical principles with deep learning techniques to solve image analysis problems. Hu strives to create novel algorithms with both concrete theoretical foundations and strong empirical results for biomedical images and beyond. Through the next few years, Hu will continue to build intelligent AI systems that can assist in diagnosis and disease treatment.
“With exceptional motivation, intelligence, and maturity, Xiaoling will continue to grow and become a successful researcher and eventually an influential member of the community!” said his advisor Professor Chao Chen.
Congratulations to Harsh Trivedi and Xiaoling Hu and a special thank you to the Catacosinos Fellowship Fund for making these awards possible over the last several decades.
-Kimberly Xiao