Ryan Koo Earns Honorable Mention for CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) undergraduate student Ryan Koo earned honorable mention for the 2023-24 Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award (URA) from the Computing Research Association (CRA). Koo, along with Athreyi Badithela, Jasmine DeGuzman, and Alice Qian Zhang, is one of four CS&E undergraduates to earn this recognition
Koo is researching natural language processing, specifically the downstream functions such as grammar checking or text analysis. Koo’s work can be used to save time and make these tasks easier for users.
“My specific concentration was on natural language processing,” said Koo. “This involves taking natural text and applying it to various machine applications and downstream tasks, such as text summarization, interpretation, and other practical tasks that involve a large sum of text data. You can facilitate a diverse range of tasks that can create a lot of mental fatigue for humans. Another subdomain of natural language processing is called neural machine translation, which involves translating one set of text to another language.”
Koo’s inspiration came from the creation of Alphago, an artificial intelligence (AI) system that was one of the first AI models created in 2014, as well as Andrej Karpathy and Yann Lecun and their work with everyday technology. Similarly, Koo decided to base his work on everyday research and how it can improve our everyday lives.
“All my research and ideas have strong influences from discussions with peers and my professors,” said Koo. “Throughout my studies at the University of Minnesota, I would say the community was my main influence for my research questions and direction.”
This award is not only an important moment for Koo but also inspiring for other undergraduate students who want to pursue research. Koo’s work aims to make writing easier for use through his language processing.
“It requires a lot of mental fortitude to demonstrate to a professor that you want to pursue different research questions, bring up new discoveries, present different solutions, implement them, and show results”, said Koo. “You really have to get used to sitting at your desk for 12 hours straight and constantly staring at a problem and really get your hands dirty with the grunt work, exploration, and trial and error. Once you do all of that, you will eventually find something exciting or with potential impact, that becomes your motivation to pursue.”
Koo credits his advisor, Dongyeop Kang, as well as Maria Gini for the success of his research. Learn more about the CRA URA and other winners.