Our own Daniel M. DiPietro '22 has been selected as a finalist for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2021. This is an extremely prestigious and competitive award, and it is quite an honor to be selected as a finalist.
Working with Prof. Bo Zhu, Daniel developed a novel machine learning architecture in his first-authored NeurIPS 2020 paper to uncover mathematically elegant governing equations of Hamiltonian dynamic systems. His work creates a type of machine intelligence toward the precise understanding of complex physics. Daniel also developed physics simulation software to facilitate prior-embedded machine learning methods for accurate control of soft-body drones in his co-authored CoRL 2020 paper.
Daniel joins a very impressive group of nominees this year. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. It is quite an honor to be selected as a finalist.
The full list of the winners, runners-up, finalists, and honorable mentions appears on the CRA website.