National Science Foundation awards Graduate Research Fellowships to two RIT students

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Fellowship supports outstanding graduate students conducting research in science and engineering





April 28, 2017 by Luke Auburn Follow RITNEWS on Twitter
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program has rewarded the exceptional efforts of two Rochester Institute of Technology students.

The NSF program provides awards to outstanding graduate students pursuing research in science and engineering. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship will provide three-year, $34,000 annual stipends to Larwan Berke and Brendan John, graduate students in RIT’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing & Information Sciences.

Berke, a doctoral computing and information sciences student from Fremont, Calif., won support for his project, “Displaying Confidence from Imperfect Automatic Speech Recognition for Captioning.” His research focuses on creating a system to identify potential errors in automatically produced captions and making captions more useful for people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH).

“It’s a big honor, and I’m elated to know that the computing researchers who evaluated my application saw potential of this research,” said Berke. “I am also looking forward to mentoring DHH students who are interested in assistive technologies. A major part of my project will be to get more DHH students interested in this field by giving them opportunities to become involved in the scientific process, as part of my NSF-supported research. Finally, this fellowship frees up funding for my adviser, Dr. Matt Huenerfauth, so he can hire even more DHH students to join our research team at the Center for Accessibility and Inclusion Research.”

John, a graduate student from Salamanca, N.Y., won support for his project, “Visual Attention in Virtual Collaborative Environments.” The project concentrated on developing a system that allows people to collaborate in a common virtual reality space to study crime scenes, diagnose medical conditions and more.

“The fellowship is prestigious and provides a sense of accomplishment, as well as motivation to follow through with my Ph. ...

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