Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Honors Outstanding Seniors

Austin Cook

From left: students Harshdeep Singh, Anthony Pham and Shi Yin Hong

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has announced the recipients of its Outstanding Senior Awards. The winners are computer engineering major Shi Yin Hong, computer science major Anthony Pham and electrical engineering major Harshdeep Singh.

As part of Hong's capstone project, she led her team in collaboration with the Department of Geosciences to collect Arkansas residential rooftop images. The team implemented computer vision models to obtain solar panel statistics, conducted machine learning-driven analysis, and completed reports for publication.

In another project, "Improving Cross-Domain Hate Speech Generalizability with Emotion Knowledge," Hong explored hate speech detection systems adaptable to diverse data. Her project aims to improve hate speech detection by investigating emotional context, written cultural linguistics and pretrained transformer models. Hong shared her honors thesis on a subgraph graph neural network (GNN) framework termed Community-Induced Graph Neural Network (CiGNN).

As the 2023 president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Eta Kappa Nu, Hong organized events, including hosting an institute's Computer Society Distinguished Visitor to discuss artificial intelligence opportunities and risks. At the same time, she served as an officer for the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. She is also a member of the Society of Women Engineers and served on the selective outreach committee.

Hong plans to pursue a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence as the next step in her academic career. Hong said, "I see the Outstanding Senior Award as a tower made by building blocks of support from my peers and mentors. I am grateful to all."

Anthony Pham has tackled an array of projects that he is proud of completing. His projects include his capstone project of developing a web application that streamlines the submission and matching of students to capstone projects across multiple disciplines. He also worked on an AI Pac-Man solver, a food-based social network app for Android, and a U of A campus navigation program. Pham said, "Winning this award is a great honor and receiving it means a great deal to me. I've made great efforts to grow myself throughout my college career, and I see this title as a validation of my hard work in continual self-growth. It would not be possible without the great staff in our department."

Pham's honor thesis is centered on developing and simulating an algorithm that can detect malicious database transactions and recover the data efficiently, with a key emphasis on efficiency.

Since summer 2022, Pham has interned at Nuqleous Retail Analytics, a local tech startup in Bentonville. The company aggregates sales data from major retailers such as Walmart, Target and Amazon. Nuqleous then converts this data into detailed reports and graphs. Pham's internship involved database modifications, customer support and platform engineering, focusing on automation and system expansion.

Outside of work, Pham has been instrumental in fostering the Vietnamese community on campus through his role in the Vietnamese Student Association. As the co-president, he organized events to celebrate Vietnamese culture and nurture leadership among members.

Post-graduation, Pham intends to pursue a career in software development, continuing at Nuqleous Retail Analytics. Long term, he plans to transition to education, leveraging his industry experience to become a teacher or professor.

Harshdeep Singh contributed toward building a four-element patch antenna array designed to operate at 1.8 GHz. Using high-frequency structure simulation software, Singh successfully designed a board, which was then milled with positive S-parameters.

Singh worked with a team of three for his capstone project. The team designed a demonstration board to teach students about the cause and result of electrostatic discharge latch-up in devices.

During his 2023 summer internship at Texas Instruments, Singh focused on micromechanical arrays, specifically mirrors or micro-electromechanical system devices. His analysis was used by the manufacturing and characterization teams to improve their designs. Singh also completed his honors thesis on low-noise amplifiers for use in common Wi-Fi applications and is designing amplifiers based on his research.

Singh has been actively involved in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Registered Student Organization for the past two years. In 2022, he served as vice president of the Power Electronics Society (PELS), helping organize events like the pre-STEM mixer. In 2023, he became president of IEEE, overseeing operations for societies including Women in Engineering, PELS, and Eta Kappa Nu. He orchestrated events to build a student community within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and provide opportunities for all students.

Singh said, "It is an honor to receive this award for this year's outstanding senior. I feel like my contributions to the department and academic achievements are appreciated. To me personally, I am happy to receive this award, and I'd like to thank the faculty, my friends, and my family who have helped me in my academic journey."

Currently, he is pursuing an accelerated master's degree in electrical engineering, aiming to graduate by May 2025. He plans to intern as a digital design engineer at Texas Instruments this summer and pursue a long-term career in the integrated circuit design industry.