Rebecca Faust Selected as a 2021 Computing Innovations Fellow

Ph.D. candidate Rebeca Faust has been selected as a 2021 Computing Innovations (CI) Fellow. This award funds Rebecca for a 2-year postdoc, beginning in January 2022, with Dr. Chris North at Virginia Tech. She was one of 69 recent or soon-to-be Ph.D. graduates across the country selected for this award in 2021. The CI Fellows program aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be PhD graduates in computing to support maintaining the computing research pipeline amidst the hiring disruptions caused by COVID-19. 

In her Ph.D. research, Rebecca has explored how to use automatic differentiation to create explanatory visualizations of non-linear projections.  Dr. North has pioneered semantic interaction methods for manipulating deep learning models. During her postdoctoral work, Rebecca and Dr. North will combine their experiences to create interactive semantic explanations for deep learning visualizations. Their project will focus on enabling human-AI interactions to inject human expertise into deep learning systems and create explanatory visualizations of the effects of those interactions on the systems in the context of text analysis tasks. 

For more information on the CI Fellows, see here.