Computer Science Ph.D. students Michael Hughes and Layla Oesper recently received fellowships from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a prestigious and highly competitive program. In addition, two other Ph.D. students, Andrew Ferguson and Brian Thomas, received honorable mentions.

Michael Hughes investigates machine learning algorithms for processing multimedia such as text documents and video clips. His research develops hierarchical Bayesian models for supervised tasks as well as inference procedures for these models via Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. His current project attempts to automatically classify human activities such as running, eating, or answering the phone ...