Faculty Mentors and their graduate student teams work closely with both the Helen Fellows and BridgeUP STEM Scholars to broaden the students’ exposure to computing research. During the BridgeUP STEM program, the faculty and their graduate students mentor the undergraduate Helen Fellows as the Fellows work in an assigned faculty mentor’s research lab on real world research projects. Together the faculty mentors, their graduate students, and their Helen Fellows facilitate the interactive BridgeUP STEM Scholars research class during the academic year.
Meet Georgia Tech’s BridgeUP STEM Faculty Mentors:
Dr. Rosa Arriaga
Dr. Rosa Arriaga is a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who earned her PhD in Psychology from Harvard University. Her research focus is on designing, developing, and deploying computational systems to improve health and wellness. She uses psychological theories and concepts to address fundamental topics in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Her current NSF funding is to develop a system to improve PTSD clinical care and practice. She also has funding from the American Diabetes Association to build a system to help manage diabetic foot health.
She has been at GT since 2007 where she advises undergraduate, Masters and PhD students; to date she has graduated 11 doctoral students. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in HCI in the College of Computing. Her User Experience Design MOOC for the Georgia Tech-Coursera partnership has been taken by over 400k learners, completed by 40k with a 4/5-star rating.
Her commitment to widening participation in computing led her to join the BridgeUP STEM Program. She mentors Muni Bundi and Eli Salisbury, two Helen Fellows. They will complete the equivalent of a senior thesis under her tutelage. She teaches BridgeUP STEM fellows core HCI principles and methods through a hands-on semester-long design project.
Dr. Sonia Chernova
Dr. Chernova is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab, where her research focuses on the development of intelligent and interactive autonomous systems. Dr. Chernova’s contributions span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adaptive autonomy, human-robot interaction, and explainable AI. She also leads the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), whose mission is to develop collaborative AI partners-in-care that help support a growing population of older adults, helping them sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across their care network. Bailey Francis and Shirley Shabanam serve as Dr. Chernova’s Helen Fellows.
Dr. Kexin Rong
Dr. Kexin Rong is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is broadly interested in developing systems and tools to help simplify large-scale data analytics, enabling non-experts to effectively utilize their large and complex datasets. Her research combines techniques from data management, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. She has been recognized with the Catherine M. and James E. Allchin Early Career Professorship in the College of Computing, an honorable mention in the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award, a best-of-conference citation at SIGMOD. She was an invited participant at the EECS Rising Stars Workshop by UC Berkeley. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2021, and a B.S. from California Institute of Technology.
Her BridgeUP STEM research class serves as an introduction to the data science process, with a focus on tabular datasets. The curriculum covers essential techniques in data preparation and cleaning, feature manipulation and a primer on machine learning. Students will actively apply these concepts in a practical data science project. Her Helen Fellows are Ashmitha Julius Aravind and Dristi Shah.
Dr. Judith Uchidiuno
Dr. Judith Uchidiuno is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing. She directs the Play and Learn Lab where lab members design culturally informed CS education technologies and increase access to computer science education in sustainable ways for students from low income and underserved communities.
Prior to Georgia Tech, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Academy. She has a PhD in Human Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute.
Her research has contributed to the design of a tablet-based learning system used to supplement formal education by over 500 students in rural Tanzania, programmable video games codesigned with children to increase computational thinking and coding skills among low income and marginalized youth in the United States, codesign of a state-wide Artificial Intelligence middle school curriculum and active collaboration with several schools and organizations. Dr. Uchidiuno’s Helen Fellows are Elizabeth Mojica and Briana Marks. As a passion project, she reviews children’s storybooks that celebrate African history and culture.
Previous BridgeUP STEM Faculty Mentors
Dr. Betsy DiSalvo
Dr. DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and founder of the Culture and Technology Lab (CAT Lab). Her research engages in the study of informal learning and the impact of cultural values on technology use and production. Dr. DiSalvo’s work has included the development of educational games such as Beats Empire, Hemonauts, and Click! Urban Adventure. She has created business-like structures within the Institute to promote entry level work in computer science and to scaffold those workers to pursue more advanced computer science skills. These projects include the Glitch Game Testers and DataWorks.
Dr. Andrea Parker
Dr. Parker is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and at Morehouse School of Medicine. Dr. Parker holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University. She is the founder and director of the Wellness Technology Lab at Georgia Tech. Her interdisciplinary research spans the domains of human-computer interaction and public health as she examines how social and interactive computing systems can be designed to address health disparities. Dr. Parker’s research has been funded through awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Aetna Foundation, and Google. She has received several best paper honorable mention awards for her research on digital health equity.
See also
Funding for the BridgeUP STEM program is provided by a generous grant from the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.