Last April, COSMOS student Mayor Inna Gurung won third place at the graduate poster competition at the annual DART conference in Arkansas, held on Thursday April 20th- 21st in Fayetteville. DART stands for Data Analytics that are Robust and Trusted (DART), which is a $24 million NSF EPSCOR grant awarded to Arkansas.  

She discusses how her presentation helped her further her skills, saying, “I learned how to present the work in a way that anyone, from any field or from across disciplines, could understand my work.” This award highlights creating new solutions for issues in big data management, security and privacy, and model interpretability.

Mayor’s work tackles the issue of big data management by discovering the narrative trends buried beneath large numbers of YouTube videos. This research is novel because it works with a media that is traditionally hard to analyze, since videos, unlike text, are difficult to process as they require natural language processing of multimedia elements to construct semantic meaning.