Jason Vega

Senior Computer Science major, Muir College

What research programs have you been a part of?

McNair (currently) and the CSE Early Research Scholars Program (CSE-ERSP) in 2019-2020.

Presentation Title & Faculty Mentor?

My presentation is "Training to Promote Certified Neural Network Interpretability Robustness" and my mentor is Dr. Lily Weng.

What's the best piece of advice your research mentor has given you?

Throughout my research project, my mentor has instilled a good research habit in me that helps to make sure I really understand what’s going on in the project. The advice is that, if you want to really understand something, try to derive the results on your own, even when the answer is already out there. For example, one of the first things she had me do during our literature review was to rederive the theoretical formulas in a paper from first principles, without looking at the paper. I think doing this really tests if you actually understand something deeply instead of just memorizing facts. I also think it gives you the opportunity to make novel insights in the process of rederiving the results, since you can question and consider alternative approaches at each step of the way.