Andy Shen

My trip to the 2024 American Causal Inference Conference in Seattle, WA was generously supported by the KAG Travel Award. The conference consisted of several poster sessions and talks from various subfields of causal inference. I was fortunate enough to be invited to present on my research in one of the sessions, which was well-attended by top causal inference researchers across the world. I was lucky to receive copious amounts of valuable feedback on my project and also share my work with those who wanted to use itr for their own work.

I also had a wonderful time getting to network with other PhD students and professors who work on causal inference problems. I was able to meet many new faces and reunite with former Berkeley PhD students. Now that I have returned, I feel a lot more inspired to continue doing research in this area and incorporate the feedback we received into our final product. I am very grateful that the KAG Travel Award afforded me this wonderful opportunity!

Austin Zane

My trip to the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Vienna, Austria, was generously supported by the KAG Travel Grant. This was my first international conference, and I had the privilege of presenting my paper on deep learning theory, "Minimum-Norm Interpolation Under Covariate Shift", during one of the poster sessions. The feedback I received was invaluable and will undoubtedly enhance the quality of my ongoing research.

In addition to the academic sessions, ICML provided an excellent platform for networking. I was able to connect with fellow PhD students, researchers, and professors, discussing both current challenges and future directions in machine learning. One of the most rewarding aspects of academia is the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions with fellow researchers, where exchanging ideas often leads to unexpected insights and new directions for our work.  

I am deeply thankful to the KAG Travel Grant and the Statistics Department for supporting my participation in this conference, which has been an unforgettable experience.

Dylan Webb

I was generously supported by the KAG Graduate Student Travel Fund to present at the 66th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Diego. This is the largest annual hematology conference, and it was an honor to be invited to present my poster entitled “Deep Learning-Driven 24-Hour Mortality Risk Assessment through Peripheral Blood Smear Morphology in Hospitalized Cancer Patients.” 

This conference was the first time I met my collaborators in-person, and it was really fun to get tacos with them! I also met many other researchers in the field of computational pathology, including Dr. Oscar Brück; his lab works with CellaVision data too, so they may be able to provide an external validation dataset in the future, making this connection invaluable. Since I am not clinically trained, it was also a great opportunity to get direct feedback on my project from several hematopathologists—their suggestions will greatly enhance the paper I am writing.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and I am very grateful to the department for making this sunny San Diego experience possible through the KAG travel grant.