Recent USC graduates De’Aira Bryant and Blakeley Hoffman have been awarded the prestigious GEM National Consortium fellowship.
The GEM (Graduate Education for Minorities) program facilitates the pursuit of graduate education in science and engineering for students from underrepresented communities by providing full tuition, fees and an annual stipend provided by sponsoring GEM universities and employers.
Bryant graduated from USC with a degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics. As a sophomore, she began using a NAO humanoid robot to work with children as a mathematics tutor. It was through this project that she learned she enjoyed educating children on mathematics and computer science.
Her junior year, she wanted to focus on minority students and the many schools in South Carolina that do not offer any type of computer science in their curriculum. Bryant received a Magellan Scholarship to develop a game that taught students about computer science through robotics and hip-hop.
In this game, students would watch a lesson on computer science and then answer a few questions. For each question the children answered correctly, they would unlock a popular dance move such as the Dab or the Milly Rock. At the end of the game, the students could use what they learned about computer science to place the moves into whatever sequence they wanted to make the robot do a consecutive dance.
Hoffman graduated from the Honors College at USC with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. She began her research in the Assistive Robotics and Technology lab where she was also working with the NAO humanoid robot.
Hoffman participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at Washington University in St. Louis where she designed an algorithm to maximize social welfare among agents. In this project, she wanted to find the most efficient way to organize resources so that all parties, whether that was animals, people or machines, would receive what they needed while not overusing a resource.
Last summer, Hoffman worked at UC Berkeley where she worked on designing machine learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles to see if the cars could infer the actions of other drivers on the road.
Currently, both Bryant and Hoffman are completing the internship component of the GEM fellowship at Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Bryant is working on a project targeting competition versus collaboration among young people and what motivates them to pursue a competitive competition as opposed to a more collaborative effort. She is doing this by creating a game similar to her Magellan project at USC.
Hoffman is designing a convolutional neural network to solve a masking problem in Adobe Photoshop. This is a type of machine learning that would help to apply graphics to a specific region of an image.
In the fall, Bryant will begin her pursuit of a doctorate in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.Hoffman plans to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to receive her master's degree in media arts and sciences.