The Siebel Scholars Foundation, a program recognizing exceptional students in the world's leading graduate schools of business, computer science, bioengineering and energy science, has named six Carnegie Mellon University graduate students to the 2017 class of Siebel Scholars. Of the 92 distinguished students across the country, Jingkun Gao, Akash Bharadwaj, Kristen Gardner, Timothy Lee, Anqi Li, and Jennifer Olsen, all with ties to the School of Computer Science, represent Carnegie Mellon on the basis of outstanding academic achievement and demonstrated leadership.

Jingkun Gao is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in CMU's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at CMU. His interests include making buildings more energy efficient through data science, and he is working on reducing the manual effort required to implement and deploy automated fault detection and diagnosis algorithms for heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in commercial buildings. He received a master's degree in machine learning from CMU, and a bachelor's in materials chemistry from USTC in China.

Language Technologies Institute master's student Akash Bharadwaj has worked with professors Jamie Carbonell, Chris Dyer and Carolyn Rosé on research that spans multilingual natural language processing, multimodal machine learning and educational technology. He is also involved in the DARPA LORELEI project, where he leads efforts toward cross-lingual transfer models for extracting the information required for rescue/relief operations in disaster scenarios from low-resource languages. He received his bachelor's of technology, computer science and engineering at India's National Institute of Technology Karnataka.  

Kristen Gardner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department studying queuing theory and performance modeling of computer systems. Her current work, with Computer Science Professor Mor Harchol-Balter, focuses on analyzing performance in systems with redundant requests. Gardner received the 2016 School of Computer Science Alan J. Perlis Graduate Student Teaching Award. She earned her B.A. in computer science from Amherst College, and an M.S. in computer science from CMU.

Robotics Institute master's student Timothy Lee aims to improve society through robotics and automation. His work with his advisor, Professor Nathan Michael, seeks to enable robots to reliably perform safety and inspection campaigns in harsh and hazardous environments. Prior to joining CMU, Lee led the development and maturation of an automated health monitoring software system deployed on a Boeing unmanned helicopter. He received his master's and bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, and a graduate certificate in artificial intelligence from Stanford University.

Anqi Li, also a master's student in the Robotics Institute, works with Professor Katia Sycara on developing distributed algorithms to summarize information of multi-robot systems and verifying cyber-physical systems. As a research intern at the University of Alberta, she developed an interface for humans to interact with mobile robots using gestures. She previously studied at Zhejiang University in China, with a major in automation.

Jennifer Olsen is a Ph.D. student in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She worked at the Vanguard Group as a developer, focusing on the learning sciences as a Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER) Fellow. She has also authored and co-authored papers at top venues, and co-organized an academic workshop on artificial intelligence in education. She received bachelor's degrees in cognitive science and human-computer interaction from CMU.

For more information on the scholars program, visit the Siebel Scholars website.