Andrew Bae — the URECA Researcher of the Month for April — is a student in the Honors College majoring in applied mathematics and statistics with a minor in computer science. He was recently announced as a recipient of the 2023 Barry Goldwater Scholarship, a prestigious national award recognizing outstanding undergraduates in math, science and engineering — one of two Stony Brook students to achieve this honor in 2023.
Since Fall 2021, Bae has been working under the mentorship of Susu Xu, an assistant professor in the departments of Civil Engineering and Computer Science, on designing and using evaluation metrics for quantifying algorithmic fairness of pedestrian trajectory algorithms to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles. In November 2022, he published a first-author workshop paper and gave an oral presentation, “Discovering and Understanding Algorithmic Biases in Autonomous Pedestrian Trajectory Predictions,” at SenSys 2022, the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems held in Boston, MA. His work in the Xu group has been supported by a URECA summer award in 2022 and a URECA mini-travel grant in Fall 2022.
Bae offered some advice to fellow students: “Embrace the uncertainty and try new things. Don’t just overcome your fear of the unknown — actively pursue opportunities that pique your interest. Your undergraduate years are the perfect time to explore different fields and discover what you truly excel at and enjoy, as the stakes are lower now than they will be later in life.”
Bae initially got involved in undergraduate research at Stony Brook as a member of the laboratory of Benjamin S. Hsiao, a distinguished professor in the Department of Chemistry, where he worked from January to September 2021 on analyzing X-ray scattering data using MATLAB. As a researcher in the Hsiao group, he also participated in the 2021 URECA/Explorations in STEM program led by Monica Bugallo, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and gave a presentation at the 2021 Summer Symposium. In addition, Bae gained experience with Yuefan Deng, a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, in Summer 2021 designing visually appealing figures that explain important concepts in numerical computing.
This summer, Bae plans to be a research intern at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. Following graduation in 2024, he intends to pursue a PhD to expand upon his interests in applying machine learning to enhance various transportation and urban systems.
Look for his poster at the upcoming URECA Celebration/undergraduate symposium on May 2.
Read the interview with URECA Director Karen Kernan.
