Daben Weiqing Liu Research Fellowship
Meet the Fellows - Cohort 2025
Aakanksha Peeru
Computer Science
Lab: Interaction Lab
PI: Maja Matrix
PI: Maja Matrix
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Evaluating Fine-grained Disengagement Behavior Classification with video-understanding VLMs
Adit Bansal
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Lab: Next Generation Digital Systems Lab
PI: Sandeep Gupta
PI: Sandeep Gupta
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Department: Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Project: Research and develop path-planning algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicles.
Alex Reyes Aranda
Computer Science
Lab: Center for AI in Society (CAIS)
PI: Vatsal Sharan
PI: Vatsal Sharan
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Understanding the Role of Noise in the Simplicity Bias of Neural Networks
Alvin Tan
Computer Science
Lab: Integrated Media Systems Center
PI: Cyrus Shahabi
PI: Cyrus Shahabi
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Predicting Temporal Population Density from Points of Interests
Annie Gao
Computer Science
Lab: Infolab
PI: Cyrus Shahabi
PI: Cyrus Shahabi
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Probabilistic Interpolation of GPS Mobility Data
Cindy Zhou
Computer Engineering
Lab: Interaction Lab
PI: Maja Mataric
PI: Maja Mataric
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Teaching Social and Emotional Learning to K-2 Students using QTRobot
Gavin Huang
Computer Science
Lab: Social Interactive Autonomous Systems Lab
PI: Ruolin Li
PI: Ruolin Li
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Department: Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Research Project: RL and LLM based Lane-Changing Framework to Optimize Weaving Ramp Congestion in Mixed-Autonomy
Isabella Martinez
Computer Science
Lab: Social Interactive Autonomous Systems Lab
PI: Ruolin Li
PI: Ruolin Li
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Department: Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Research Project: RL-based Management Mechanism of AV Operators in Mixed-Autonomy Networks
Jeremy Yu
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Lab: Irimia Lab
PI: Andrei Irimia
PI: Andrei Irimia
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Department: USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology
Research Project: AI and Machine learning to reverse engineer local brain age
Jiayu (John) Li
Applied and Computational Mathematics
Lab: Interaction Lab
PI: Maja Mataric
PI: Maja Mataric
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Learning Therapist-Aligned Facilitation Policies via multi-agent simulation for support groups
Leyaa George
Computer Engineering & Computer Science
Lab: Interaction Lab
PI: Maja Mataric
PI: Maja Mataric
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Socially Assistive Robots for Personalized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
McKenzie Tang
Computer Science
Lab: Radiomics Lab
PI: Bino Varghese
PI: Bino Varghese
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Regional hippocampal radiomics analysis reflects memory impairment in patients with early onset multiple sclerosis
Meredith Li
Computer Engineering & Computer Science
Lab: Learning and Interactive Robot Autonomy (Lira) Lab
PI: Erdem Biyik
PI: Erdem Biyik
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Implementing and evaluating Behavioral Cloning (BC) and DAgger algorithms on benchmark environments (CartPole-v1)
Neta Shubin
Computer Science
Lab: Humans Lab
PI: Emilio Ferrara
PI: Emilio Ferrara
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Department: Viterbi School of Engineering
Research Project: Creating cultural personalization of LLMs
Alice Jiang
Artificial Intelligence for Business
Lab: Irimia Lab
PI: Andrei Irimia
PI: Andrei Irimia
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Department: USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology
Research Project: Developing tools and methods to predict future cognitive impairment
Noah Tekle
Electrical Engineering
Lab: Ershaghi Center for Energy Transition
PI: Young Cho
PI: Young Cho
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Department: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Research Project: Developing portable Long-range Wireless Methane Gas Sensors
Qianwei Guo
Applied and Computational Mathematics
Lab: Interaction Lab
PI: Maja Mataric
PI: Maja Mataric
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Socially Assistive Robots for Personalized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Reyna Patel
Computer Engineering & Computer Science
Lab: Interaction Lab
PI: Maja Mataric
PI: Maja Mataric
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Socially Assistive Robot-Guided At-Home Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Exercises
Rishi Jain
Computer Science
Lab: Next-Generation Data Intensive Systems Group
PI: Ibrahim Sabek
PI: Ibrahim Sabek
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: An end-to-end ML-driven database system that autonomously adapts indexing, optimization, scheduling, and execution to user workloads and data distributions.
Ritvik Manicka
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Lab: Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) Lab
PI: Yalda Khashe
PI: Yalda Khashe
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Department: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Research Project: AI for Patient Safety and Quality of Care in Surgical Operations
Rohit Panicker
Biomedical Engineering
Lab: Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) Lab
PI: Yalda Khashe
PI: Yalda Khashe
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Department: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Research Project: Developing Artificial Intelligence models and applications for use in Healthcare
Shruti Natala
Computer Science / Business Administration
Lab: Health Systems Engineering Lab
PI: Shinyi Wu
PI: Shinyi Wu
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Department: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Research Project: Identifying and evaluating key social and environmental challenges affecting Los Angeles for the Haynes project
Sunny (Junyang) Yu
Artificial Intelligence for Business
Lab: Language, Intelligence, and Model Ethics (LIME) Lab
PI: Jieyu Zhao
PI: Jieyu Zhao
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Examining how current AI systems are reshaping student–teacher relationships
Thor Christoffersen Hochman
Computer Science
Lab: Data, Interpretability, Language and Learning (Dill) Lab
PI: Swabha Swayamdipta
PI: Swabha Swayamdipta
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Exploring “human-like” attributes in text generated by LLMs
Trent Kobielusz
Computer Science
Lab: Center for AI in Society (CAIS)
PI: Bistra Dilkina
PI: Bistra Dilkina
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Department: Viterbi School of Engineering
Research Project: Intent Detection in Social Media Position regarding Wildlife
Tyler Davis
Computer Science / Business Administration
Lab: Nweke Research Group: The N.E.S.T
PI: Chukwuebuka Nweke
PI: Chukwuebuka Nweke
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Department: Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Research Project: Temporal Analysis of Ambient Vibrations for Seismic Site Response Modeling / Ensemble ML Modeling of Biocemented Characteristics
Weixi Chen
Computer Science
Lab: NexDIG Lab
PI: Ibrahim Sabek
PI: Ibrahim Sabek
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Embedding an LLM/model inside the internal to optimize the DBMS behavior
Yufan (Kevin) Chen
Computer Science
Lab: SEPT
PI: Mengyuan Li
PI: Mengyuan Li
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Department: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Research Project: Side-Channel Security of Large-Scale KV-Cache Systems in Modern LLM Serving
Yuhang (Logan) Song
Computer Science
Lab: Air Pollution-Climate-Equity (ACE) Research Group
PI: Jiachen Zhang
PI: Jiachen Zhang
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Department: Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Research Project: Predicting Future Ozone Concentration Changes and Associated Health Impacts in California under SSP Scenarios Using Deep Learning

