James L. Carmon Scholarship Award
The James L. Carmon Award is presented to University of Georgia graduate students who have used computers in innovative ways. Named for the late James L. Carmon, a UGA faculty member for 36 years who helped make the university a leader in computing research and development, the award was established by the Control Data Corp. Each year, graduate students may be selected as Carmon Scholars or for Honorable Mention.
Camila Livio, a doctoral student in the Department of Romance Languages, has co-written three published academic papers and presented at a dozen conferences. Her dissertation project uses computational tools to process and analyze natural language data in Spanish and Portuguese, constructing corpora from various cyber social spaces—social media, online customer reviews—to understand the mechanisms of these languages, as well as develop new technologies for language instruction.
Zachary Peck, a graduate student in the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is investigating OpenAI’s GPT-3, the most advanced language-processing technology currently available. In addition to investigating how GPT-3 can be trained to do specific tasks using solely natural language instruction, Peck’s research grapples with pressing existential questions, such as how the introduction of such technologies could radically reshape society.
Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award
The Robert C. Anderson Memorial Award is given to recent Ph.D.s for outstanding research at the University or immediately after graduating. It is named for the late Robert C. Anderson, who served as UGA’s vice president for research and president of the University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc.
Cecilia Sánchez, who completed her Ph.D. in December 2019, is a research scientist at EcoHealth Alliance. She studies viral spillover from bats to humans. For her doctoral research, Sánchez examined how urban living affects wildlife movement, exposure to environmental contaminants, and pathogen transmission, conducting extensive field work on flying foxes in urban and rural landscapes across Australia. She used bench work, mathematical models and synthetic reviews to address important questions in infectious disease ecology and beyond, publishing nine papers—six of which are first-authored—since starting her Ph.D. in 2014.