8/27/2024 Bruce Adams – Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “Interest in machine learning among students is growing, but the current opportunities to join labs and research groups are becoming increasingly limited.” That’s how Ron Arel describes the impetus behind Lapis Labs, a Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at The Grainger College of Engineering student-led academic research group created to help promote machine learning and artificial intelligence research. “We’re fortunate at the university to have numerous renowned labs conducting pivotal research in the field, attracting many students eager to start their research careers and contribute to solving real problems in machine learning.”
Arel and Andy Zhou started an RSO on campus called AI@UIUC. As Arel puts it“We initially focused on technical work for students with less background in machine learning, working on projects using current ML tools. As research interest grew, we created several dedicated cohorts. After publishing our first few papers and traveling to Hawaii to present some of our work, we decided to establish the research team as a separate entity with a new moniker. We wanted to give our research team its own identity and differentiate it from other university labs with very similar names. And that’s how Lapis Labs started.”
Arel notes that although Lapis Lab has used space in NCSA with the aid of CS faculty advisor Volodymyr Kindratenko in the past, “most of our work is done remotely, and when we collaborate, we primarily use Slack. We also like to hold bi-weekly lab-wide meetings so that all students and collaborators can stay up to date with the work being done, as well as have a platform to share ideas, discuss challenges, and foster a sense of community. At the end of the day, we function as any other university lab with its own resources, computing, and research interests.”
Arel notes that “what we discovered is that many students from different universities are eager to pursue research, but their campus organizations don’t offer those opportunities.” He concludes, “Now that we’ve been doing this for about a year plus, we’re excited to be working with other universities and students who have the skills and are seeking opportunities to publish research in the field. So that’s where we’re going next.”
To read the complete article go HERE.