Muhammad Ahsan, Tianqi Song, and Bharath Kumar Chelepalli

Ben Stoddard and Hieu Bui

Christopher Painter-Wakefield

About 55 students worked and played at the department's third biennial Graduate Student Retreat, September 21-23, at Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC.

“It was a fantastic experience and a break from work,” noted second-year Ph.D. student Puneet Jain. “The best thing about the retreat was that I got to know people in the department better. I am friends with students in my year, but the retreat helped me in knowing people from different research groups and years.”

The opportunity to meet and socialize with other students is just one of the goals for the retreat, which was started four years ago by former CS graduate student Jeff Phillips, now an assistant professor at the University of Utah. The retreat, organized by students, also serves to educate new students in navigating graduate school and provides a chance to talk about research.

“Graduate school is different from college or from a professional occupation, so we’re just sort of helping ease the transition,” said Jeff Martin, a Ph.D. student who has served on the planning committee for each of the three retreats.

Graduate Program Coordinator Marilyn Butler was one of the few faculty and staff invited to attend the event. She helped drive students to the retreat and noted that the event brought a lot of "firsts" to students typically busy with their research — such as a first long car ride, a first look at the Atlantic Ocean, and a first visit to a coastline with waves.

“It’s funny how it’s not that big a department, but there are so many students who don’t know each other,” Butler said. “This breaks down those barriers. I think they all really bonded quite a bit, but they did a fair amount of work too.”

The retreat began on a Friday night with dinner and a poster session. Jain’s poster — voted as best by fellow students — presented a scalable system to process and cluster live feeds, such as from spectators of a football game, in real time according to user interests. Jain worked on the project, called FOCUS, at IBM Research this past summer.

On Saturday students had another chance to present their research, this time fine-tuning 30-second and 2-minute research summaries — dubbed “elevator pitches” — in small groups. Butler said, “The theory of it is, if you go to a conference and you end up in an elevator with some famous computer scientist, you have to know how to distill what you do" in the time it takes an elevator to travel from one floor to another. After polishing their pitches, students participated in "lightning rounds" in front of the whole group. Ph.D. candidate Susanna Ricco won.

Saturday also featured two panel discussions, one with senior students on what they had learned in navigating graduate school, and another with recent graduates now working in industry. Professor Ashwin Machanavajjhala, the department’s newest faculty member, also spoke to students about his research and experience working in industry as well as the process for job searches in academia and industry. On Sunday Professor and department Chair Carlo Tomasi discussed responsible conduct in research, and students also learned some techniques for giving more engaging, useful talks.

Students found ways to play too. They hit the beach for kayaking on Saturday, and both of the two nights away from campus featured games and movies.

“The retreat is one of those intangibles that make the department better, more friendly and more collaborative,” Butler said. “I also think that it teaches them skills that they will need when they leave graduate school. It broadens their horizons.”