This summer I have the amazing opportunity to conduct research under Prof. Julia Hirschberg and her PhD student Ziwei (Sara) Gong at her Spoken Word Lab at Columbia University. This has been such an incredible experience so far, and I’m sure it will continue to be for the next month and I want to dedicate a couple blog posts to detailing my experience. 

To even get involved, I cold-emailed dozens of professors across the country to express my interest in their work. I had the same basic framework for each email but I did research on the work that these professors were doing in their lab in the hopes of getting an opportunity to work with them. Truth be told, I didn’t get that many responses. In fact, out of the dozens, I only got a couple of responses from professors with clear next steps for proceeding. I totally understand from the professor’s side that taking on a high school student can be extremely difficult and time-consuming, and sometimes not safe given the lab environment, so I wanted to express my gratitude to all the professors who took time to respond to my emails, even if they kindly expressed that I could not get involved with their research. 

Prof. Julia Hirschberg has some incredible work in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and used to be the head of the CS department at Columbia University up until very recently. Her spoken word lab group has many research projects that often deal with interdisciplinary topics that merge subjects like culture, mental health, emotion, social media, etc. with NLP to create models to better understand and detect certain aspects. Additionally, they have a heavy emphasis on multimodal data, which are data that come in not just one form, but a variety. For example, datasets for mental health that have both video and text with them would be considered multimodal data. 

This summer, my project involves researching different mental health conditions including anxiety, suicidal ideation, PTSD, schizophrenia, among many others and develop strategies to enhance detection and diagnosis. I have also had the amazing opportunity to stay in NYC for 7 weeks and travel to and from campus during the weekdays to work in the lab and attend weekly meetings in person. We (our research project group) hope to be able to publish our findings in a paper or the proceedings of a conference by the end of the summer! I’m so grateful to Prof. Hirschberg, Sara, and everyone else on the research project team who made this possible, and I’ll keep you updated in the next post. Thanks for reading and see you soon!