Congratulations to Sangwu Lee and Alex Martin–winner of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award.

It has been wonderful to have Sangwu Lee and Alex Martin work in the HCI lab and win honorable mention award at the 2023-2024 Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award competition.

Sangwu Lee worked in the HCI lab since his freshman year. He won the O’Brien Book award as a freshman and never received anything below an A in all his classes. While double majoring in CS and math (and acing through his classes), he also dedicated much of his time to research.

Sangwu worked as an enabler who, instead of leading a project, opted to work closely with graduate students and diversify his skills by learning from them. This allowed him to publish papers in various diverse venues, including ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, Nature, IMWUT, and JMIR. He had the rare opportunity to work closely with multiple generations of Ph.D. students, including Kamrul (URCS Ph.D. 2022), Wasifur Rahman (URCS Ph.D. 2023), Saiful, and Tariq (current PhD students).

Alex Martin is a force of nature. During his time at URCS, he collaborated closely with Jiebo Luo, Aaron White, Ehsan Hoque, and Clyde Martin. He also actively participates in the NLP reading group and has a full paper as a first author at the ACM Multimedia conference, among other things.