PhD Research Showcase
The Computer Science PhD Research Showcase is an annual departmental event to showcase the research of our PhD students, who have the opportunity to demonstrate their research, receive feedback, and exchange information. The departmental objectives are the following:
- to improve the student鈥檚research communication skills,
- to provide to feedback related to the students鈥� research progress and presentation of their ideas and results,
- to encourage scientific exchange of ideas between students and faculty working in different areas, and
- to promote internal community developmentby getting to know faculty and peers.
PhD Research Showcase + Three-Minute Thesis Competition
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
10 AM - 1 PM
PGH 5th Floor
Light refreshments will be provided.
Schedule
10:00 am Welcome
10:10 am Three-Minute Thesis Competition
10:50 am Poster Session 1
11:40 am Poster Session 2
12:40 pm Awards
Participating Students
| Poster | Name | Title | Faculty Advisor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ahmed, S M Masrur | Cite or Decline(CoD): A Strict Course-Grounded Chatbot for STEM Lecture Videos | Jaspal Subhlok |
| 2 | Ahmed, Zarif | MRI-Informed 3D Surface Reconstruction Using RBF and Harmonic Deformation | Fatima Merchant, Guoning Chen |
| 3 | Alfageeh, Ali | How Much Prompt Is Enough? Delta Debugging for Few-Shot Minimization (DD-FSM) | Amin Alipour |
| 4 | Alhazmi, Somaia Mohammad | Understanding How CS1 and CS2 Students Seek Help from a Customized AI Tutor | Jaspal Subhlok |
| 5 | Alkhamees, Saleh Abdulaziz | MisCon: Detecting Programming Misconceptions from Student and AI Tutoring Conversations | Amin Alipour |
| 6 | Alshdaifat, Duaa Ahmad Helael | Prompt Retrieval with a Pretrained Decision Transformer for Continual Reinforcement Learning | Sen Lin |
| 7 | Bouzid, Yasmine | Wearable Sensing Reveals the Structure of Cardiac Activation During Everyday Driving | Ioannis Pavlidis |
| 8 | Carroll, Thomas Patrick | Using Vehicular Deadlines to Solve for a Selfless Traffic Assignment Solution Using Edge-Based Interaction | Albert Cheng |
| 9 | Dunbar, Arthur P | SVDQF: A Comprehensive Objective Framework for Analyzing Software Vulnerability Dataset Quality | Rakesh Verma |
| 10 | El Aidos, Fatima Ezzahra | A Proposed Framework for Adaptive Certification of 4D Flow MRI Reconstruction | Lennart Johnsson |
| 11 | Gdihi, Adnane | SPECTRA: Domain-Specific Accelerator for Ultra-Low-Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (ULF-MRI) Reconstruction | Lennart Johnsson |
| 12 | Jeyhani, Mahtab | Filling the Gaps: Mask-Guided Frame Interpolation for Low-Phototoxicity T Cell and Cancer Cell Tracking | Badri Roysam, Guoning Chen |
| 13 | Manavi, Mahdi | Oracle-Attested Risk-Adaptive Admission and Endorsement Control for Permissioned IoT Blockchains | Yunpeng Zhang, Guoning Chen |
| 14 | Murphy, Michael Patrick | Improving MRI Reconstruction Using Reference Signals for Physical Admissibility | Nikos Tsekos |
| 15 | Pan, Pei-Chi | EarMark: A Multimodal Dataset of Everyday Noise-Sensitivity Responses from Self-Report and Passive Sensing | Emani Hicks |
| 16 | Neibert, Connor Ryan | Improved Consensus Under an Adaptive Adversary | Gopal Pandurangan |
| 17 | Paul, Dipta Chandra | A Generic Algorithm Integrating Parallel Processing and Block-Based I/O for Large-Scale AI Analytics | Carlos Ordonez |
| 18 | Quadir, Hashirul | I/O efficient Algorithms for Sparse Matrix Multiplication and Addition | Carlos Ordonez |
| 19 | Shen, ChengAo | MetaCaster: Meta-Harness-Optimized Agent for End鈥恡o-End Few鈥怱hot Learning of Lightweight Time Series Forecasters | Jingchao Ni |
| 20 | Tanin, Ummey | A Real-World, Large-Scale Dataset for Automated Skill Evaluation in Central Line Dressing Change | Pam Qian |
| 21 | Tuck, Bryan E | Orthographic Constraint Satisfaction and Human Difficulty Alignment in Large Language Models | Rakesh Verma |
| 22 | Walia, Jatindera S | Efficient Detection of Meaningful Transitions in Lecture Videos | Jaspal Subhlok |
| 23 | Weatherly, Chad Duncan | Rethinking Continual Anomaly Detection on the Edge: Benchmarking Under Realistic Industrial Conditions | Sen Lin |
| 24 | Wen, Jiaqi | Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning with Generative Ambiguity Set for Water Distribution Networks | Jianyi Yang |
| 25 | Yang, Youyi | Periodic Anderson Acceleration for GPU-based Elastic Body Simulation | Zhigang Deng |
| 26 | Yarahmadi, Aryo | Borrowed Preambles: Improving the Scalability of Concurrent Transmissions in 802.15.4z | Om Gnawali |
| 27 | Yasmin, Farzana | PDE-State Conditioning for Learned Optimization Using Physics-Informed Neural Networks | Guoning Chen |
| 28 | Yin, Qinran | OmniGesture: Multi-Modal LLM-Driven Synthesis for Natural Dyadic Conversation in VR | Zhigang Deng |
| 29 | Zafar, Adeel | A Deep Learning Framework for Hairpin Vortex Identification in Wall-Bounded Turbulent Flows | Guoning Chen |
For Fall 2026, all CS PhD students who have passed the PhD RCE exam or have started their third year and beyond are expected to participate.
Expectations and Timeline:
- by Friday, September 18, 2026.
- Registered students will be manually added to PhD Showcase course in Canvas
- Submit draft poster via Canvas course by Saturdya, October 3, 2026.
- Attend Faculty Office Hours on Friday, October 9, 2026, time TBA, location TBA. This will be to receive in-person feedback on your poster.
- Submit final poster via Canvas for judging review by Friday, October 16, 2026.
- Submit a final poster via Canvas for printing by Wednesday, October 21, 2026.
- Present on Wednesday, October 28, 2026.
Dates and times subject to change. Updates will be announced in Canvas for those who register.
Fall 2025
- Best Poster: Chad Weatherly - Continual Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Industrial Environments (Advisor: Sen Li)
- Honorable Mention: Ruofan Wu - Compose RAG: A Modular and Composable RAG for Corpus-Grounded Multi-Hop Question Answering (Advisor: Feng Yan)
- Honorable Mention: Adeel Zafar - Automated Hairpin Vortex Extraction in Turbulent Boundary Layers (Advisor: Guoning Chen)
- People's Choice Best Poster: Hosein Neeli - OptiFlow: Deep Learning-Based Motion Estimation and Frame Interpolation for Brain MRI (Advisor: Nikolaos Tsekos)
- People's Choice Runner Up: Dipayan Biswas - Role of Speech Transcripts and Video Frames in Summarizing Presentation-Style Educational Videos (Advisor: Jaspal Subhlok)
- People's Choice Runnder Up: Ruofan Wu - Compose RAG: A Modular and Composable RAG for Corpus-Grounded Multi-Hop Question Answering (Advisor: Feng Yan)
Fall 2024
- Judge's Choice Best Poster: Thomas Carroll - Work-In-Progress: Using Interaction Between Vehicles to Reduce Deadline Tardiness from a Route Assignment Perspective
- Judge's Choice Best Poster: Michael Yantosca - ARTIC/Phonotomizer: An Adaptive, Real-Time Pipeline for Unsupervised, Multilingual Phonetic Segmentation
- People's Choice Best Poster: Meng-Chen (Martin) Lee - DialogueDiffu: Dyadic Conversational Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis
Spring 2024
- Judge's Choice Best Poster: Robert Griffin - Designing Mobile MRI Scanners: Mass Efficiency of Halbach Ring Design Parameters
- Judge's Choice Best Poster: Meng Chen (Martin) Lee - Online Multimodal End-of-Turn Prediction for Three-party Conversations
- People's Choice Best Poster: Vuong (Dustin) Nguyen - Contrastive Viewpoint-aware Shape Learning for Long-term Person Re-Identification
Spring 2023
- Judge's Choice Best Poster: Urmila Sampathkumar - Statistical Shape Models for Outcome Simulation in Breast Surgeries
- People's Choice Best Poster: Urmila Sampathkumar - Statistical Shape Models for Outcome Simulation in Breast Surgeries
Organizing Committee
Dr. Guoning Chen, chair (gchen22@central.uh.edu)
Mr. Matthew Pariyothorn (mmpariyo@central.uh.edu)