NC State Student Researcher Stories

Bio: Jerry Avornyotse is a Graduate student in the M.S. Communication program at NC State. His research interest lies in the intersection of AI, Music, and Copyright.

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Project Title: Development of Responsible AI Agents for Interpreting and Enhancing Access to Large Environmental Datasets

Project Description: This project involves the implementation of responsible AI practices to ensure ethical use, transparency, and fairness in data interpretation. This objective was achieved through activities such as building ethical LLM surveys, drafting coding schemes and sheets for content analysis by AI developers, and identifying measures/scales for public survey designs.

Proudest Contribution: I am most proud of my contribution to the U.S./U.K. Public Survey, which successfully yielded over 1,300 responses from stakeholders in just one month.

Bio: Connor Blake is an undergraduate business major at NC State, who transferred from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte after discovering the new music technology major. As a student who has always had a passion for music, he hopes to be able to achieve his bachelor’s within the MUT program.

Project Title: AI-Powered Feature Analysis and Categorization of Musician Performances and Technique

Project Description: The project team started with the goal to gain a better understanding of what exact characteristics separate a beginner’s musical technique from a professional’s. As we began developing tools and methods to collect and compare this data, we realized this could prove to be an effective instructional tool for teachers and students (particularly during practice times when the student is not meeting in person with an instructor).

Proudest Contribution: I am most proud of my contribution to labeling multiple images of a piano keyboard so that our software will be able to eventually detect a keyboard wherever the user places their camera and then provide accurate key detection in order to help the student improve. I am also very proud of my musical score sheet parser, which will be used to help the student improve where they make mistakes.

Bio: Lucas Bauer is a graduate student in the Genetics program at NC State. 

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Project Title: Time-Based Patterns in Plant Responses: Advancing Our Understanding of the Effects of Climate Change through Dynamic Data

Project Description: Our project uses cameras to study the structure and color of tomato plants as they respond to stresses, with a focus on warm nighttime and nematode worm stresses. Cameras allow for non-invasive measurement of plant stress responses, which enables us to study how the plant responds throughout its life and the day-night cycle. We aim to develop tools to analyze these plant stress responses at a large scale and provide insight into the genetic factors that govern how plants adjust to their environmental stressors.

Proudest Contribution: I am most proud of training others to work with scientific images, particularly undergraduate students. Plant imaging is a critical part of plant science across fields, yet it is often not within the expertise of either plant scientists or computational biologists. The support provided by the DSA has allowed us to implement training for undergraduate and graduate students in this unique skill set, encouraging collaboration to improve imaging best practices.

Bio: Emily Gaines is a graduate student in the Master of Science in Textiles program at NC State. Her current research focuses on the comfort and support level of apparel clothing for individuals with physical disabilities and women over the age of 50 through use of 3D Body Scanning and 3D Apparel Product Development.

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Project Title: AI-Powered Personalized Clothing Development System for Individuals with Physical Disabilities

Project Description: The purpose of the study is to understand the unique clothing needs and challenges faced by individuals with physical disabilities. The information gathered will contribute to the development of innovative solutions, including AI-powered clothing recommendations tailored to individual needs.

Proudest Contribution: I am proud to have fostered an inclusive and supportive environment for individuals who may not have always been comfortable communicating the struggles they face within the apparel industry.

Bio: Anurag Gorak is a Computer Science Master’s student at NC State with expertise in developing AI solutions and web applications. Anurag’s background includes experience in machine learning and full-stack development, and with two years of experience working in a bank as a data scientist. In his free time, he likes to read mythological fiction and play cricket.

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Project Title: AI-Powered Feature Analysis and Categorization of Musician Performances and Technique

Project Description: I’m developing tools to automatically synchronize and analyze piano performances, allowing researchers to identify and analyze performance patterns, technique variations, and stylistic differences. We aim to develop a mobile application to help students record their piano practice sessions and provide instant feedback about their strengths and weaknesses, and help tutors in teaching pianos.

Proudest Contribution: I am most proud of designing the alignment algorithm that compares two piano performances of the same score and provides a detailed analysis of the same. The integration work I’ve done to create a unified desktop application has streamlined the research workflow, enabling musicologists to conduct more comprehensive studies with less technical overhead.

Bio: Jaekuk Lee is a student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NC State. His research explores AI-mediated communication, human-technology interaction, and strategic communication, drawing on data-driven methods to examine how emerging technologies shape public discourse and user experience.

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Project Title: Combating AI-Augmented Mis/disinformation Among Higher Education Students

Project Description: This project examines how college students perceive and respond to AI-generated misinformation, such as deepfakes and synthetic images. Through a survey, we explored psychological and social factors that influence their attitudes and behaviors. The findings will help inform media literacy efforts and institutional responses.

Proudest Contribution: I am most proud of leading the development of a multi-theoretical framework that shaped the foundation of our survey instrument. I brought together insights from different models, structured the conceptual flow, and ensured that our measurement strategy aligned tightly with our research goals.

Bio: Aditya Singh is a Master’s student in Computer Science at NC State. Aditya is currently working at the intersection of deep learning and plant biology, using image-based models to analyze crop responses to environmental conditions. Previously, he led research and internships focused on computer vision, natural language processing, and AI-driven applications in both academic and industry settings. 

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Project Title: Time-Based Patterns in Plant Responses: Advancing Our Understanding of the Effects of Climate Change through Dynamic Data

Project Description: This project aims to study how tomato plants respond visually to warm night temperatures (WNT) versus normal night temperatures (NNT) using images taken throughout the day. By training machine learning models to analyze these images, we are working to identify patterns that indicate stress or adaptation in the plants. The long-term goal is to automate this analysis process and connect it with phenotype data to support agricultural research. Our approach combines deep learning with time-based and spatial features from the plants.

Proudest Contribution: I’m most proud of building a suite of robust, interpretable models that not only achieved strong performance but also produced insights through visualizations like Grad-CAM heatmaps. These helped us understand where and how the plant image features contribute to classification, bringing us one step closer to explainable plant phenotyping.

Bio: Alyssa Wenzel is a graduate student in the Biomathematics PhD program at NC State. Her research interests are in machine learning, agent-based models, and topological data analysis. She will soon be finishing up her PhD and plans to pursue a career in industry. 

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Project Title: Deep Learning and Topological Data Analysis to Inform Models of Fluidization of Cell Migration

Project Description: The project uses various techniques to analyze collective cell movement, specifically by employing agent-based modeling (ABM) to address movement patterns that can’t be captured by traditional methods. Topological data analysis (TDA) and Bayesian methods are applied to select the best models for describing this movement, based on experimental data from microscopy. The models developed are flexible and could be applied to real-world biological processes such as wound healing and cancer metastasis.

Proudest Contribution: I am particularly proud of my work in developing the extended pipeline for model selection. Despite initial skepticism from some reviewers regarding its feasibility, it is gratifying to have successfully implemented the pipeline and demonstrated its effectiveness.

Bio: Yifan Wu is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at NC State. His research focuses on applying sensing technologies and machine learning methods to the field of computational ethology and plant science.

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Project Title: Time-Based Patterns in Plant Responses: Advancing Our Understanding of the Effects of Climate Change through Dynamic Data

Project Description: This project aims to use computer vision approaches to identify phenotypic features from the plants under various treatment conditions. By identifying these automatically extracted features, it could help us learn what conditions can have benefits when growing the plants, and also help associating with genotypic features.

Proudest Contribution: My contribution to this project is to enable the capability to collect phenotypic data using various optical sensor systems.