9/3/2024
Student presentations celebrate productive internships at ARI
During the summer and academic year, ARI welcomes student interns who partner with our professional research staff to gain hands-on experience working on our ongoing research projects.
This summer, six students presented their research and experiences from the summer at two sessions in August.
On August 9, the first three students gave presentations to ARI researchers and administrators.
Khimaya Bagla, an undergraduate student at Brandeis University working with Dr. Heather Filippini, joined the group of researchers studying ATONs (aids to navigation) used by mariners to navigate safely. Khimaya acted as the point of contact for the project in Connecticut, where she assisted in running experimental simulations with ship pilots and analyzing the resulting data.
Sophie Zeithaml is an undergraduate mechanical engineering student at the University of Illinois (Illinois). She worked with Dr. Daniel Krogstad on a project investigating biocompatible materials toward the development of synthetic bone. Her tasks included assessing factors for additively printing collagen and how that printed collagen performs in a mineralization process that is important for replicating the mechanical properties of real bone.
Shreya Shetye, a graduate student in computer science at Illinois, also worked with Dr. Filippini. Her work contributed to a project focused on automation of data extraction from charts in published research articles, leading to successful extraction of more accurate data from line plots.
In the second session on August 15, presentations were given by three students who worked with Dr. Ana Lučić. They contributed to Dr. Lučić’s recently awarded NEH grant to develop a method to computationally identify peritextual elements within the digitized book collections in the HathiTrust Research Library.
Mohney Raza, Tanmoy Debnath, and Sakshan Jain, all students at Illinois, presented jointly to discuss how they contributed to the annotation process within the peritext project.
In the annotation process, individual pages are identified as being front matter, core text, or back matter. The core text is the main body of text written by the author, while front and back matter are materials outside of the main body of text, such as tables of contents or indexes. This process was first done manually and later applied using an automated system.
Mohney, an undergraduate information studies student, primarily worked on creating guidelines for annotating selected works from the HathiTrust Library. These guidelines cover frequently asked questions, troubleshooting problems, and a how-to guide.
Tanmoy, a master’s student in information management, created a tool that would automatically annotate the pages. This program allows pages to be processed more efficiently, speeding up the annotation process and reducing error.
Finally, Sakshan, a master’s student in industrial engineering, tested the reliability of the human annotators to see if there was consistency in how pages were being categorized. Based on the results of comparing different people’s annotations of the same pages, the annotation guidelines could be updated to reduce variability.
To learn more about the student interns mentioned in this article, visit our student intern profiles here.