DSI Summer Programs 2026 Research Symposium

The DSI Summer Lab and Data Science for Social Impact Research Symposium represents the culmination of eight weeks’ worth of student research and hard work. This event is a wonderful opportunity to learn about our students’ exciting summer research projects. The event will include themed sessions where students will present their research projects, followed by live Q&A moderated by their peers. At the end of the event, we will host a poster session and reception.

Talks will take place in the Faraco Family Commons Room 105 at the Data Science Institute at 5460 S. University Ave, Chicago, IL.  Contact Lilly Gullickson at lgullickson@uchicago.edu for questions.

August 7, 9am – 4pm
Data Science Institute
Faraco Family Commons Room 105

Breakfast – 8:30 – 9:00 am

Welcoming Remarks – 9:00 – 9:15 am
David Uminsky, DSI Executive Director; Kyle Chard, Summer Lab Faculty Director; Mario Bañuelos, Data Science for Social Impact Research Director

Session 1: Biomedical AI & Health – 9:15 am – 10:15 am
Real-Time Sleep Classification with CNN and HMM (Kalyan Cherukuri)
Fusing High-Spatial-Resolution and Ultrafast DCE-MRI Expands Breast Vessel Networks (Sarit Bose)
Graph Neural Network Modeling of Breast MRI Vascular Networks for Treatment Response Prediction (Spencer Venancio)
Data Normalization and Embedding Harmonization for Mitigating Batch Effects in Histopathology Data from Renal Allograft Rejection Biopsies (Jeremy Dawe, Idranne Mbah Ndum)
Predicting the Clinical Translational Potential of Alzheimer’s Research Across Therapeutic Approaches (Francesca Kang)
Filling in The Gaps: Black Maternal Health (Lilly Weaver, Peace Amichoh, Edward Kofi Sie, Mali Glemaud-Thesee, Christyana Walker)

Session 2: Education, HCI, Robotics & Intelligent Systems – 10:15 – 11:00 am
Neural Alignment Between Students Predicts STEM Learning (Srinidhi Raman, Samantha Adorno)
TutorialEMS: Body Actuation to Make Physical-Skill Video Tutorials Accessible for Blind and Low-Vision Viewers (Andrea Louise Conde)
Hands-on Robot Teaching and Generative Retrieval of Dynamic Movements with toio Robots using LLM (Sasha Preuss)
Synergizing the Brain and the Muscle: An ML-Powered Self-Driving Robot for Battery Development (Nathan Hu)

Break – 11:00 – 11:15 am

Session 3: AI, Machine Learning & Data Science – 11:15 am – 12:15 pm
Mind the Gap: Using UK and US English to Explore how LLMs Process Different Dialects (Eva Neves)
The Palm Oil Crisis: A Forecast of Deforestation in Sumatra (Janine Marie Villegas, Sasha Carr, Yuxuan Li, Srihitha Solleti, Gabriela Germán Toledo)
Transit-Layer Tensor Representation for Serverless Inference (Ben Mechels)
The Heart of Chicago: Visualizing Community Needs Through 311 Requests (Nyela Djossou, Ashley Gonzalez, David Arciniegas, Lauren Corbie)
Chasing Butterflies: Toward Improving or Degrading AI Weather Models! (Daniel Boscu)
Latent Space Simulation (Khuaja Sediqi)

Lunch – 12:15 pm – 1:15 pm

Session 4: Materials, Semiconductors & Physical Sciences – 1:15 – 2:00 pm
Semiconductors and the Economics of Innovation (Kenzi M’hamdi)
Evolutionary Chimeras at Scale: Horizontal Transfer and Vertical Inheritance in Semiconductor Product (Huy Nguyen)
Forecasting California Pesticide Use Closing the 2-year reporting gap, one active ingredient at a time (Luis Ortiz, Peter Kasomo, Sodeeq Adeyinka, Tristan Prathap)
Large Language Models for Battery Electrolyte Formulation Discovery (Fife Adeyemo)
Integrating Optical Data into a GNN Architecture for Neutrino Classification (Vihaan Rathi)

Session 5: Environment, Earth Systems & Biology – 2:00 – 2:55 pm
Expanding Valley Fever Forecasting In California With Environmental LSTM’s (Sanaa Jain, Austin Tathong, Félix Arzola, Hiep Le)
Inferring Ice Viscosity Bounds Using Statistical Machine Learning (Anvita Kallam)
How Observational Sparsity and Sampling Strategy Affect Viscosity Inference in Ice Shelves (Nima J. Sherpa)
News that Spreads like Spores: Using Media Signals to Predict Valley Fever Incidence (Jules Ruiz, Bibesh Sedhain, Zion Spruill, Rebecca Sonn-Lees)
Hidden Language of Microbial Communities (Vardah Khan)

Closing Remarks – 2:55 – 3:00 pm
Lilly Gullickson, Research Program Administrator

Poster Session + Reception – 3:00 – 4:15 pm
Group 1 stands by posters from 3:15 – 3:45
Group 2 stands by posters from 3:45 – 4:15