Hunter Computer Science Student Chosen for Summer Research Assistantship at MIT

Hunter College senior Matthew Evanusa '14 will spend this summer as a research assistant with the InfoLab group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), a science and technology center focused on the interdisciplinary study of intelligence, selected Evanusa for the highly sought after position from a national pool of candidates.

Evanusa is among the first students to benefit from Hunter's partnership with CBMM, which is based at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, in partnership with Harvard and Cornell. It is supported by a five-year, $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

"It is a great honor and privilege to represent Hunter in such a setting and to participate in the advancement of artificial intelligence with such truly exceptional researchers," said Evanusa.

The InfoLab group is one of the artificial intelligence laboratories affiliated with CBMM, and is responsible for the START Natural Language Question Answering System, which has been answering people's questions on the Web since 1993.

"This is a remarkable opportunity for Matthew to learn about how computers share knowledge with people," said Susan Epstein, a professor of Computer Science at Hunter and its representative to CBMM. "This will be terrific preparation for his planned graduate study in computer science," she added.

Curious about the START Natural Language Question Answering System that Matthew will be working on? You can try it here: http://start.csail.mit.edu/index.php