Rhett Olson Receives the CRA Honorable Mention for Geographic Information Systems Research
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) alumni Rhett Olson earned an honorable mention for the 2024-25 Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for his paper titled, “An Automatic Approach to Finding Geographic Name Changes on Historical Maps” Additionally, Olson earned the award for his work as a teaching assistant for CS&E and a board member of the Board Game club. Olson graduated in fall 2024 with his BS in computer science and mathematics, and joined fellow CS&E student Ryan Diaz as a recipient of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.
Olson’s research aims to help researchers in disciplines like history, geography, humanities, and other fields that use historical maps effectively as resources. His goal is to allow the user to search for a specific place and then retrieve historic maps that use the different names a place has used over time. This is significant as name changes can tell individuals about cultural or geographic changes in a region.
“If you take Istanbul for example, you could find maps that call it Istanbul, Constantinople, Byzantium, and multiple different names that refer to the same place,” Olson said. “You can see a zoomed in view of that place as its name changes over time on many historical maps.”
Olson credits his time in CSCI 3901 - Intro to Undergraduate Research in Computer Science for inspiring him to pursue research during his time as an undergraduate. Taught by Professors Maria Gini and Shana Watters, the course covers the process of doing research and includes current research presentations from faculty at the University of Minnesota. Professor Yao-Yi Chiang was one of the presenters in Olson’s class and discussed his system called mapKurator, which recognizes text on historical maps. Maps present unique challenges compared to other images that are processed for text recognition because they can have older, more calligraphic fonts.
“If you're trying to get involved in research as an undergrad, the main thing I would try to do is to find existing work from faculty at the UMN, and look into the limitations of the research that would be interesting to explore in the future,” Olson said.
PhD student Jina Kim met with Olson every week and talked about the project, giving him the ideas that inspired his research. Chiang was instrumental in helping him write and edit the final paper. The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) aided him by giving him funding for his undergraduate research project. The next step for the project is to move it onto a platform that's heavily accessible for people in relevant fields. Olson hopes to create a website that is easy, accessible and gets results quickly.
“I was very honored to be nominated for this award by Professor Yao-Yi Chiang, who I worked with on this project, and that the rest of the department believed in me enough to use one of their nominations on me.”
Olson presented his initial work at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL) in 2023 where he won the student research competition in Hamburg, Germany. He went on to place third at the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Final. The U of M sponsored Olson to attend the conference in Germany with where he got to meet other researchers.
“Above all, it really built up my confidence as a researcher, and made me feel that I have the skills to succeed in graduate school. I have already contributed research that people find interesting and valuable.”