As part of an annual tradition, the College of Natural Sciences recongized a select number of graduates from across the college with its highest undergraduate honor. Nominated by faculty, three Computer Science graduating seniors were named as part of the Dean's Honored Graduates.
Alan Baade
Dean’s Honored Graduate in Computer Science
Alan Baade will graduate with a B.S. in computer science and mathematics as a Turing Scholar. His undergraduate research focused on machine learning for speech, audio and visual understanding, working with David Harwath and Kristen Grauman. Baade is first author on four papers presented at top conferences, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition and the International Conference on Learning Representations and Interspeech, and he recently defended his honors thesis, which introduced an algorithm for discovering syllable units directly from raw speech. A finalist for the Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, his long-term goal is to develop universal learning algorithms that can understand the world from raw sensory input. After graduation, Baade will pursue a Ph.D. in computer science with a focus on computer vision at Stanford University.
Prasann Singhal
Dean’s Honored Graduate in Computer Science
Prasann Singhal is graduating with a B.S. in computer science and a B.A. in linguistics. Since his first semester, he has worked in Greg Durrett’s lab, conducting research in natural language processing (NLP) to improve language models like ChatGPT. Singhal has published four first-author papers at top venues, including an oral spotlight at the Conference on Language Modeling, an honor reserved for the top 2% of submissions. His research has spanned topics from efficient text processing techniques to uncovering limitations in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithms used in both industry and academia. He is currently studying the relationship between training data and output diversity in language models. Singhal credits his growth to his advisor, Greg Durrett, and supportive mentorship from Ph.D. students in the lab. Outside of research, he has led two directed reading program groups and served as a course assistant for an NLP class. In the fall, he will begin his Ph.D. studies in computer science.
Jimmy Xin
Dean’s Honored Graduate in Computer Science
Jimmy Xin is a Turing Scholar graduating with a B.S. in computer science and a minor in philosophy. His research focuses on formal verification systems and automation tools. His senior thesis formalizes resource ownership in programs based on probabilistic independence and contributes to a project on verifying probabilistic programs with collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Xin has published research on automatic policy synthesis for robots and automatic proof generation. At UT, he co-directed the UTCS Directed Reading Program, served as a problem-writer for UT programming competitions and was a course assistant for a class on algorithms. Outside of academics, Xin enjoys outdoor climbing, crosswords, dancing and visiting bakeries.
To see all 25 students named Dean Honored Scholars this year, read the full article on CNS News.