MEDIA, Pa. – Meera Ramasamy, a second-year engineering student, was selected to participate in Penn State’s Multi-Campus Research Experience for Undergraduates (MC REU) Summer Program. The MC REU program is an intensive eight-week program where a select number of students in the College of Engineering conduct research with Penn State faculty.
Ramasamy will conduct an experiment under the faculty supervision of Sharon Tan, assistant teaching professor of engineering at Penn State Brandywine, comparing off-the-shelf Vision Transformer (ViT) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models from Hugging Face — an artificial intelligence platform — to evaluate how well they can perform fine-grained image classification for visually similar images.
“I’m so excited to be able to participate in this program over the summer,” Ramasamy said. “I’m very happy and proud of myself to be accepted into this program.”
Ramasamy learned about the experience through one of her friends in her major, who then encouraged her to apply. After applying, she started to brainstorm what topics she wanted to research. She said she wanted to research ViT and CNN models because of her familiarity with the topic, as she wants to develop her skillset more.
“I chose this project because I was familiar with traditional transformer models used in natural language processing and recently learned about their applications in computer vision through visual transformers,” she said. “I was interested in pursuing a project in the Computer Vision domain that was both meaningful and achievable with my current skill set.”