Student in CSSE earns invite to Grace Hopper Conference, Google mentorship program

Mousumi Akter, a third-year doctoral student in computer science and software engineering at the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, was awarded a student scholarship to attend the Virtual Grace Hopper Celebration Conference, Sept. 27-Oct. 1, and was selected for the Google CS Research Mentorship Program.

“This was such a tremendous honor, earning this prestigious scholarship and having the opportunity to represent Auburn University in the world’s largest gathering of women in computing,” said Akter, who works as a research assistant in the Big Data Intelligence Lab at Auburn.

Akter had the opportunity to network and learn from prominent female computer scientists across the world during the annual Grace Hopper Celebration, which provides scholarships to excellent computer scientists based on merit and purpose.

“I came to Auburn from Bangladesh, where women face several obstacles and limitations,” she said. “The conference provided me with the opportunity to hear from female leaders who had gone through similar experiences and encountered comparable barriers. But they're glowing now, which gives me even more motivation to keep going.”

According to Google Research, the CS Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP) encourages students to pursue computing research by providing professional mentorship, peer-to-peer networking, and raising knowledge about different paths within the discipline.

The goal of Akter’s study is to find solutions to real-world problems utilizing text data. Her PhD research intends to develop a general-purpose text analytics framework that allows users to quickly assess facts and claims in a straightforward and interactive manner without having to worry about the specifics of natural language processing. Another area of research that she is engaged in is the automatic evaluation of text summarization, which is a difficult but important NLP task due to the subjectivity that is inherent in any human language.

“My research is focused mainly on developing tools that will discover factual information from a large pool of data using the power of deep learning, as well as the automated evaluation of these tools,” said Akter, who earned her bachelor's degree from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. “Here at Auburn, I’m acquiring the experience that I'll need for my future career.

“My role at Auburn allows me to collaborate with a broad spectrum of individuals as well as work on exciting research challenges. “I am receiving the greatest computer science experience I can receive at a university.”