By Rick Vacek | August 14, 2024
Before he began working in the Clark Summer Research Program this year, incoming freshman Kade Ponzo scheduled a flight to Canada for the day after he finished his first foray into The University of Texas at Dallas.
Little did he know that his airline knowledge was about to take off with his research project, “Forecasting Air Traffic Route Demand with Transformers.”
“I booked my flight and thought, ‘There will be an airplane waiting for me. There’s an airline that will service me,’” he said. “But I didn’t think about all the different factors that go into that. They have to be able to predict that to provide me with that flight. Now I can go to the airport and say, ‘Now I know how things work here.’”
Ponzo’s work was on display Aug. 2 in the University’s Activity Center as the Summer Platform for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) symposium demonstrated its continuing growth. The first sign of that expansion was the simple fact that it was in the Activity Center, a much larger venue than before.
From 170 participants in its first year to 207 in 2023 to 240 this year, SPUR has been spurred on to new heights by the research abilities of UT Dallas students – and not just graduate students.
“The quality of the work I’ve been seeing in general – you have to pinch yourself to think of this as undergraduate research,” said Dr. Donal Skinner, dean of the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College, the sponsor of the Clark program and SPUR symposium, while going station to station to hear students’ presentations.
He was so impressed by a student’s research into the hunt for a prostate cancer cure, he said later, “The way she can explain it, you’d swear she’s a graduate student. That’s something I’ve come to expect of UTD students. They operate as undergrads at the level that many grad students operate at – just exemplary. It’s very rewarding to see that.”
Dr. Benedict Kolber has worked with a lot of undergraduate researchers – he’s the 2024 winner of the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring, and he manages the SPUR program alongside Dr. Ben Porter MS’08, PhD’11, associate professor of instruction in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.
Thus, it doesn’t surprise Kolber, associate professor of neuroscience in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, when he sees what these students can do.
“Our undergraduates are fabulous,” he said. “Of course, when they’re brand new they have to learn a lot – there’s a steep learning curve. But they’re very strong, especially once they’ve been in the lab for a year or a summer or two.
“They really are operating at the level of master’s students or even first- or second-year PhD students. Some are really extraordinary.”
One of the students deserving of such lofty praise is sophomore information systems major Praneeta Srinivas, whose poster presentation was titled, “Exploring Algorithmic Bias in Recommendation Systems.”
Her hypothesis: Recommendation algorithms on social media display inherent biases based on user demographics.
To test that hypothesis, she created 11 advertisements for a Facebook page she called “Senioritis to Freshman Fever,” which discussed the transition from high school senior to college freshman.
One base ad had a simple background, and there were five apiece for men and women of different races. She still was waiting on results at the time of the symposium, but her preliminary conclusions were that clear biases exist, and these biases influence content visibility and user engagement.
“I can already see that distribution is different based on the content,” she said.
The acknowledgments on Srinivas’ poster included a thank-you for the guidance of Dr. Upender Subramanian, PhD Area Coordinator and Professor of Marketing, and Dr. Ramesh Subramoniam, Clinical Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Research, both in the Naveen Jindal School of Management (JSOM).
Therein lies another important aspect of SPUR’s success: the Jindal Undergraduate Research Scholar (JURS) program.
When he came to UT Dallas six years ago, Subramoniam noticed that many students wanted to do independent study with him. Research is not generally something associated with business schools, but it is at UT Dallas, thanks to the JSOM dean, Dr. Hasan Pirkul, who initiated the JURS program.
Pirkul said the Jindal School faculty ranks in the top five in the world for research productivity.
“A typical student coming to business school is not thinking about research even though research is every bit as important in business as other disciplines,” he added. “It instills in them the instinct to think outside the box, to question the status quo and search for better solutions.
“We put together the JURS program to encourage our students to do research and take advantage of one of the major strengths of our school.”
Subramoniam noted how extensive that encouragement is: “We tell students to pick the topic, and we will connect them with faculty, both tenure and non-tenure. They have the freedom to select where they want to go.”
Last year, he chose 30 students out of 55 applications. As of Aug. 2, he already had 15 applications for this year, and the students hadn’t even returned to campus.
“The faculty is motivated, and now students are motivated,” he added. “That is the goal of this program – to get students excited. I want to get everybody into this process.”
The Clark program gets students in the process even sooner.
“The energy the students are bringing is so great, especially seeing that it’s (recent) high school students,” said Dr. Vatsal Maru, assistant professor of instruction in the Jindal School.
Maru was the faculty mentor for Ponzo, who never would have believed that he would be studying air-traffic operations just a few weeks after graduating from Carroll Senior High School in Southlake.
His complex poster, filled with equations, took pains to prove that a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) could accurately forecast what airline routes are most needed.
With Maru’s help, Subramoniam looks forward to incorporating more research like that into the JURS program.
“That’s the future,” he said of Ponzo’s air-traffic study. “Everybody is shifting from forecasting from a traditional system to AI-based models. All the software providers are moving into real-time tracking of supply chains and forecasting demand.
“This is going to be such a valuable resource and will actually pave the way for future research. These are all very real-time, real-world topics.”
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From News Center: Undergrads Showcase Summer Research Projects at SPUR Symposium