As someone who has just completed their fifth semester of undergraduate research, I think it goes without saying that the experience is invaluable for gaining a stronger grasp of and learning how to push the frontiers of knowledge in your research field. Not only does this give you a leg up on the competition when…
Author: Vivek Rajkumar
My CURF: Becoming a Researcher
According to a 2021 report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Earth’s average surface temperature has reached its highest level in 125,000 years. Furthermore, many geologists believe that we have now transitioned from the Holocene (the roughly 12,000-year geological epoch which allowed sedentary human societies to develop and flourish in the first…
My CURF Introduction
Hi everyone! I’m Vivek and this semester I’m working with Dr. Xiaowei Jia to study how temporal convolutional neural networks can be used to predict water conditions. What are temporal convolutional neural networks, you might ask? Great question! A temporal convolutional neural network (TCNN) is a type of machine learning (ML) architecture which can take…
My Brackenridge… Endings?
As my Brackenridge Fellowship comes to a close this summer, I would say that my understanding of research and scholarly work has changed significantly — and not in the way I expected. I don’t know if it’s just my specific research project, but the process has turned out to be much drier, tedious, and less…
Communicating My Brackenridge Research
If I were talking to a lay audience about my research this summer, I would first need to distill it into something understandable by the general population. My specific project involves a lot of jargon and acronyms that aren’t familiar to the average person, and I’ve encountered difficulties explaining it even to other Brackenridge Fellowship…
My Brackenridge Cohort
This summer, I hope to learn more about research methods and about the sorts of research that are conducted in fields outside of my own. Over the past few weeks, I’ve genuinely enjoyed meeting and getting to know the other members of not only my cohort, but the entirety of the Brackenridge community. From what…
My Brackenridge Beginnings
About Me Hi everyone, my name is Vivek (he/him) and I’m a rising senior double majoring in computer science and psychology with minors in economics and English literature. I grew up in Monroeville, PA (about 20 minutes away from campus) and have an older brother who graduated from CMU. I came to Pitt to pursue…