Ida Behreini

I am a blind computer science undergraduate who spent the summer at Texas A&M University conducting research on Natural Language Processing.

A Byte About Ida

As an ambitious and outgoing university student, I strive to learn all I can about the world of computer science. Due to my blindness, I face many day-to-day challenges which arise chiefly from social stigmas looming over disability. I believe technology is the greatest equalizer and that diversity in STEM will fashion inventive algorithms. Code—like all things—can harbor the unconscious biases of its writer. Thus, I believe that truly innovative code is fresh, minimalistic, and inclusive. I am very excited to leave my home in New Jersey and leap into research at Texas A&M University. Thanks to the CRAW-DREU Program, a challenging journey awaits! Please feel free to browse and see what I’ve been up to this summer.

Goals & Info

My Mentor

Ruihong Huang is a professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include weakly supervised Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Visit her website here.

My Project

Over the next 10 weeks, I will explore all aspects of graduate school life. I will work in an active lab and benefit from one-to-one mentorship by both my professor and fellow students. Moreover, I will start my own research project and gain hands-on experience. My area of interest, Noun Phrase Event Detection and Extraction, will involve a myriad of new and challenging concepts. I've outlined some questions I'm going to be wrestling with:

-What is NLP and how does it fit into the broad umbrella of Artificial Intelligence?

-Where do we stand in terms of solving the problem of having computers understand human text?

-What unique real-world applications will NLP potentially provide?

-Why is detecting and extracting noun phrase events challenging?

-How do computers and humans differ in their interaction with text?

-What is Stanford CORENLP and how can it be used in event extraction?

-What is GigaWord and how will I use it to train a computer to recognize noun events?

-How does my work contribute to future research?

To document my findings, I'll be uploading weekly journal entries. In these reports, I hope to articulate all my experiences during the DREU program.

My Photos

I had some amazing adventures and made some great friends during the DREU program! My new friends, Kiffany and Tamisha, joined me in exploring the college station area. Tamisha and I explored a drive thru safari in Franklin! We saw some Zebras, Bison, Giraffes, and much more! The gang also went ice skating, caught some great movies, and visited Grand Station Entertainment in Bryan where we bowled and played some bumper cars! About halfway through the summer, my boyfriend came to visit me and we decided to take a nice trail ride up near Austin! I visited the state capitol, took a walk down Austin’s famous Rainey Street, and even made some new friends at a local drag show! All in all, it was a wonderful summer both professionally, and personally! here are some photos that depict my stay: