By Heidi Opdyke
Michael Craig is hoping the third time will be the charm for him in Carnegie Mellon University's Three Minute Thesis competition.
Craig, a doctoral student in the College of Engineering, is one of the finalists who will be discussing their research from 5-6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 4, in McConomy Auditorium. Three Minute Thesis is a research communication competition that challenges Ph.D. students to give a compelling presentation on their thesis and its significance in just three minutes, in language that anyone can understand.
This is Craig's second time in the finals — he placed second in 2015 — and third time participating in the program. Each year he has discussed a different aspect of his research. This year his talk is titled "Grid-scale electricity storage: A help or hindrance for mitigating climate change?"
"Last year I got too involved in the details," Craig said. "But it's such a good experience. More people should participate."
Pallavi Bajlejkar, a student in the School of Computer Science's Language Technologies Institute, is participating for her second year. Her research focuses on speech, but she said while public speaking makes her nervous, "people should try it even if you're scared."
Her talk, "Speech Synthesis from Found Speech," looks at how she is working with large sets of data publicly available from sites like YouTube from low-resource languages on the web to create acoustic models with it.
For example, Konkani and Kannada are languages spoken in regions of India. While both are spoken by more than a million people, there are relatively few sites that are translated into them or have text-to-speech capabilities. Bajlejkar said companies such as Google and Amazon are starting to devote more resources for languages found in emerging markets.
"There are more and more special conferences popping up devoted to low-resource languages," she said.
This is CMU's fourth year hosting the event, which started at the University of Queensland in 2008. The competition has been adopted in more than 57 countries at hundreds of institutions.
University Libraries Dean Keith Webster brought the concept to CMU and hosts the competition.
"Our students are doing such interesting, innovative and complex work. It's a joy to learn more about their research and see how they approach the challenge of conveying it to a non-specialist audience," Webster said.
This year saw CMU's highest number of participants, with 78 graduate students participating in 10 rounds of preliminary competitions.
Ania Jaroszewicz, who is pursuing a doctoral degree in behavioral decision research in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Science's Department of Social and Decision Sciences, is competing for the first time. The focus of her talk is "How the Psychology of Poverty Affects Behavior and Financial Outcomes."
She said she hopes people take away from her talk the idea that poverty is complicated and goes beyond financial issues.
"There are a lot of other factors, helplessness, isolation, hopelessness," she said. "Poverty is much more complex than many people perceive it to be and consequently, understanding those complexities can improve the effectiveness of welfare programs."
Jaroszewicz said Three Minute Thesis has given her an opportunity to think about how she communicates her work to people who might use it to help shape policy or nonprofit programming.
"For researchers like me, you get used to speaking to other people in your field and using terminology and shortcuts that others may not understand," she said.
A panel of judges will select the overall winner and runner-up. The audience will select the People's Choice Award winner.
This year's finalists who have been announced so far are:
- Pallavi Balejikar, Language Technology Institute
- Michael Craig, Engineering and Public Policy
- Jooli Han, Biomedical Engineering
- Ania Jaroszewicz, Social and Decision Sciences
- Sudipto Mandal, Materials Science and Engineering
- Diane Nelson, Biomedical Engineering
- Will Penman, English
- Emily Simon, Biological Sciences
- Jesse Thornburg, Electrical and Computer Engineering