Jonathan Pei, COL ’27, Wilmington, DE
This summer I had the opportunity to work with Professor Mingmin Zhao and PhD student Haowen Lai. I had started working in this lab in December of 2023 and this summer gave me a good opportunity to commit more time and immerse myself fully in the research.
Zhao’s group focuses on wireless sensing technologies and machine learning. Before the summer, my research involved exploring the possibilities of using mobile devices to perform 3D reconstruction with neural radiance fields. This could allow for high-detail 3D scans with a smartphone and other interesting applications.
During the summer, however, the project I worked on was propagating uncertainty through deep neural networks. Deep learning is a powerful technique that can give fast and accurate solutions to difficult problems. However, deep neural networks can sometimes provide unexpected and incorrect answers. In fields such as medicine where safety is critical, being able to tell when the output can be trusted is of paramount importance. My project attempted to improve upon previous methods of measuring how confident a neural network is in its own predictions in both speed and accuracy.
In this group, I was able to explore a lot of my different research interests from applied areas such as computer vision to the more theoretical parts of machine learning. I had the chance to apply many concepts that I had learned in my computer science and probability classes. And, I was also able to learn many new skills such as the machine learning library PyTorch and even how to properly analyze research papers.
Additionally, I was able to work with and interact with everyone else in the lab. It was fascinating to learn about all their own projects and their own research journeys. These experiences throughout the summer not only strengthened my technical abilities but also solidified my passion for pursuing research in machine learning and its applications.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
