Computer Science sophomore Ananya Srinivasan (Class of 2019) has been awarded a prestigious research fellowship for an 11-week summer program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Through a national and highly competitive application process, and with the guidance of Dr. Deborah Knox, Ananya was selected to participate in the NIST Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. The SURF program is sponsored by NIST and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
During her fellowship during Summer 2017, Ananya will be working with Dr. Ram Sriram. Ananya’s project, Extracting Terminology and Ontologies from Documents, will focus on building an infrastructure to generate metadata and taxonomy for data sharing to support data analysis and project development. She will use a “root” and rule-based approach, one that’s used in many Indo-European languages (Latin and Sanskrit), to build such an infrastructure. Ananya will be working to apply this method to on-going projects at NIST.
Ananya will be working in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at NIST. The fellowship program is designed to provide hands-on research experiences in a number of areas, including computer security, information access, software testing, networking, and communications technologies. ITL has the broad mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology through research and development in information technology, mathematics, and statistics.
Ananya shares her thoughts about the SURF Opportunity: I am very happy to participate in the NIST SURF Program this summer and share my interest in technology with likeminded peers. The SURF Program appealed to me since the Information Technology Lab at NIST offers many opportunities to learn more about Natural Language Processing and other areas of computer science. I believe that working under the guidance of the experienced researchers in the lab will help me improve as a computer scientist. I intend on going to graduate school so I believe the knowledge I will gain from this experience will guide my future research interests.
In addition to her mentored research work completed within the department, Ananya is a member of TCNJ’s Honors Program and participates in the Women in Learning and Leadership (WILL) Program.
Congratulations to Ananya for being awarded a NIST SURF fellowship!
