CS&E’s Rhett Olson Places Third at the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) undergraduate Rhett Olson placed third at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition (SRC). ACM SRC is a competition where undergraduate and graduate students present their research work in front of a panel of judges. Undergraduate student Rhett Olson presented a continuation of his historical map query system research from the SIGSPATIAL Research Competition in the fall 2023.
“Winning this award has given me a lot of confidence as a computer science researcher,” said Olson. “It’s very encouraging considering all the work that I have put into this project and how much I enjoy working on it. It's really great to see other people reading my paper and thinking so highly of it. It’s great to know I’m not alone in my love for historical maps and other people can see the value of my work.”
Olson’s work focused on a query system that can retrieve maps of a given place that can display all of the different names for that place that have been used on maps and when each name was used on a historical map. After the SIGSPATIAL Conference, Olson was able to further his research by adding a method that can detect multi-word names on historical maps, making his research more robust and complete.
“I was pleased to find that my system could retrieve, on average, hundreds of maps for these places that use multiple-word names,” said Olson. “That was encouraging, to be able to see the different ways my research can be used, as someone who has a lot of interest in history but not an academic background.”
Olson’s code is currently easy to use for those with coding experience, but may be difficult to use for people in non-computer science fields with less coding experience. Olson hopes to develop more accessible, user-friendly applications for his research, allowing people from the history, humanities, and geography fields to easily use his query system for their research.
“I would say that the thing I am working towards for real-world applications would be to make this accessible for people who work in history,” said Olson “I hope to have people from humanities, geography, and many others who have expertise with place names to be able to use this data to gain insights using their academic expertise in these fields.”
Olson wants to thank associate professor Yao-Yi Chang and PhD student Jina Kim for their help and guidance throughout his research. Olson would also like to thank his friends and family for their support throughout his research.
“I think getting feedback throughout the process is great,” said Olson. “You get feedback on your work from previous rounds of the competition, and it’s a great opportunity to spend time thinking about what you should do to further your research. Even if you have the winning results from your first competition, you should think critically about what your results were, the shortcomings, and what might not have been as clear to people viewing your work. Then you can try to use that feedback to move forward and keep improving your projects.”