Highlights from Our 2024 Summer REU Program

This summer, we welcomed 15 talented students from across the country on Emory’s beatiful campus. Under the umbrella theme Learning from Images, the students worked in five teams, each diving into projects aimed at advancing our understanding and ability to learn from imaging data. This program, held over eight weeks on campus, provided the young researchers with an opportunity to engage in cutting-edge computational mathematics and machine learning.

The Learning from Images theme tackled a timely challenge: how to make sense of the overwhelming amount of imaging data generated daily. Computational algorithms can unlock insights from this data, improving our ability to detect new patterns and enhance image quality, especially in areas critical to healthcare. Each project addressed a unique aspect of this challenge—from improving image distribution models and optimizing measurement designs to refining algorithms for reconstructing image sequences. You can read more about the projects here.

The students worked with their mentors to explore and develop advanced imaging techniques that leverage machine learning, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and differential equations. Weekly project meetings, a seminar series, and various social events fostered an engaging learning environment. Students had the chance to present their progress in midterm presentations, culminating in a highly anticipated final poster session.

The poster session marked the program’s grand finale, drawing a large crowd of faculty, students, and postdocs. Each team showcased their findings and shared insights from their experiments, highlighting the strengths and potential areas of improvement for their algorithms. By a narrow margin, this year’s poster award went to the team of Malia Walewski, Rishi Leburu, Claire Gan, and Callihan Bertley for their project on Improving VAEs with Normalizing Flows. The picture below shows Malia and Rishi presenting their work.

All teams created a poster blitz video and wrote blog posts about their work, which are now live on the 2024 tab. These additional resources capture the excitement and innovation of the program and give a closer look into the students’ experiences.

We’re proud of our 2024 REU cohort and look forward to following their careers in the years to come!