Siebel School SRP Lunch and Learn: How to do Research Part 1: Coming Up to Speed - Camille Cobb, Katherine Mimnaugh and Yongjoo Park 06022026

Abstract

How to do Research Part 1: Coming Up to Speed

How to get started on a new research topic. How to do a literature search. How to read a paper. How to identify the researchers you’d like to follow and how to do it. How can you determine what is good research and what isn’t? Importance of reproducibility in open science. 

Speakers

Professor Camille Cobb

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois.  Until July 2021, I was a postdoctoral researcher working with Lujo Bauer in the CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University. I earned my Phd in June 2019 from the University of Washington in Computer Science & Engineering. During my PhD, I was advised by Tadayoshi Kohno in the Security & Privacy Research Lab and Alexis Hiniker from the UW Information School.  My research focus in usable security and privacy. My work aims to ellucidate and address users' security and privacy concerns. In particular, I recognize that many perspectives have been historically left out of conversations about security and privacy, and I seek to correct for this through my work.

Dr. Katherine Mimnaugh

I am a UIUC CS Future Faculty Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher working with Prof. Nancy Amato in the Parasol Lab. I completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and worked for a decade as a lab manager in cognitive neuroscience research labs at UIUC in the Psychology department and Beckman Institute. I received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Oulu in Finland, where I studied immersive robotic telepresence with Prof. Steven LaValle. My interdisciplinary research bridges human-centered computing, human-robot interaction, virtual reality, and psychophysiology to investigate cognitive, physiological, and perceptual responses to interactions with technology. I leverage explicit and implicit measures to provide insight to technology design and build responsive systems. I am particularly interested in creating restorative technologies that benefit human health and well-being, as well as developing seamless and intuitive communication channels for the control of assistive robots through brain-computer interfaces and virtual reality. My research has been cited nearly 900 times, and received recognition with scholarships from Google and Nokia. I was also selected for Rising Stars in EECS at MIT in 2025. 

Professor Yongjoo Park
 
Yongjoo Park is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At UIUC, he is part of Data and Information Systems (DAIS) Research Lab. Also, Yongjoo is a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Keebo, Inc., a start-up company he co-founded based on his Ph.D. research. Yongjoo's research interest is in building intelligent data-intensive systems using statistical and Artificial Intelligence techniques. Yongjoo obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2017. His dissertation received the 2018 SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation runner-up award.