Neehar Peri Receives Honorable Mention in CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Program

Neehar Peri, a senior majoring in computer engineering, is among 105 students being recognized by the 2021 Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award program this year. There were four winners, five runner ups, 23 finalists and 73 honorable mentions. Peri has been recognized with honorable mention by the prestigious program, which acknowledges undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding potential in an area of computing research.

CRA, sponsored by Microsoft Research, said in a statement on their website that this year’s nominees are a “very impressive group,” with many of the students involved in more than one research project, and others active in the development of software and apps.

CRA is an association of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies.

Peri is conducting research with Rama Chellappa, a College Park Professor of electrical and computer engineering and John Dickerson, an assistant professor of computer science. Chellappa and Dickerson both hold appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

In Chellappa’s research group, Peri is focused on building intelligent traffic analytics systems for next-generation smart cities. Specifically, he is working on improving privacy-aware vehicle re-identification and traffic anomaly detection.

Peri’s work with Dickerson focuses on building more robust machine learning systems. Specifically, he has designed defenses for clean-label poisoning attacks, a type of adversarial attack on the training data used for creating machine learning algorithms. More recently, Peri has begun working on building robust but fair auction mechanisms using techniques from deep learning.

Original Story by Melissa Brachfeld, UMIACS.

Published December 22, 2020