Category: James L. Carmon Scholarship Award

James L. Carmon Scholarship (Honorable Mention) 2025

Aiman Munir, Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computing, develops advanced algorithms for robotics and multi-robot systems, focusing on energy-efficient informative path planning (IPP) and task coordination in GPS-denied environments. Under the mentorship of Assistant Professor Ramviyas Nattanmai Parasuraman, she has pioneered novel approaches to IPP and coverage control, optimizing how robots explore unknown environments while conserving energy. Her research has led to multiple peer-reviewed publications in top robotics conferences and has applications in precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and search-and-rescue operations. Munir’s energy-aware coordination framework improves robot performance in resource-limited settings. She received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award from the School of Computing and has contributed to open-source robotics research. Munir’s work looks to the future of autonomous systems, enhancing their efficiency, adaptability, and real-world applications.

James L. Carmon Scholarship 2025

Luyang Fang, Ph.D. candidate in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Department of Statistics, develops innovative machine learning algorithms that improve the efficiency and reliability of large language models. Under the mentorship of professors Ping Ma and Wenxuan Zhong, she has pioneered Bayesian Knowledge Distillation (BKD), an advanced method for compressing AI models while quantifying uncertainty in their predictions—critical for deploying AI in healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems. Fang has published in top venues such as the International Conference on Machine Learning and IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, and her BKD framework has been applied to computer vision and education assessment. She also co-developed MultiCOP, a machine learning tool for microbiome-metabolome analysis, and collaborates on AI-driven research across multiple disciplines. A recipient of multiple Georgia Statistics Day awards, Fang’s work helps shape the future of trustworthy AI and statistical machine learning.

James L. Carmon Scholarship

Ehsan Latif, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computing, is an exceptional scientist who has demonstrated significant productivity, creativity and insightfulness. Latif works at the computing intersection of advanced algorithms and wireless networking innovations for multi-robot systems. He is developing methods to improve multi-robot systems in coordinating their actions for localization and exploration. These systems must know their individual locations while continuously communicating with each other so they can perform complex tasks and interact with human observers (such as collaborating with first responders in post-disaster search and rescue efforts. Latif’s research has led to algorithms that provide high localization accuracy and efficient exploration for robots while reducing communication and computational demands. He also explores the use of network-related devices like sensors to solve problems, such as localizing robots in unknown environments and designing new frameworks for multiple robots to collaborate. He exploits dynamic reinforcement learning with optimized usage to provide efficient exploration.

James L. Carmon Scholarship

Alison Banks, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, applies critical state-of-the-art Earth system modeling to understand how climate change affects global air quality. Each rainfall event cleanses the atmosphere of harmful pollutants (such as particulate matter), but climate change is redistributing rainfall patterns and frequency across the globe. Conventional representation of rainfall in climate models tends to bias rainfall as “too-light-and-too-frequent.” By crafting a simulation where particle emissions are held constant, combined with a new technique that represents clouds at all scales, Banks is developing a model that could help identify areas where air quality is deteriorating because of climate change. Her research advances scientific understanding of rainfall patterns and the health impacts of harmful air quality events.

James L. Carmon Scholarship

Erica Mitchell, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry, investigates the properties of molecules using a combination of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The prediction of reliable molecular properties requires a trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. During her time at UGA, Mitchell has worked to implement explicitly correlated methods, which increase the accuracy of electronic structure theory, and apply density functional methods, which decrease the computational burden. Using automatic differentiation or AD, she is striving to get first- and second-order derivatives of explicitly correlated methods to obtain optimal molecular structures and vibrations at a low computational cost. This research will offer a new approach to achieve molecular properties by utilizing AD for a method with no known derivatives. By generating exact derivative properties of explicitly correlated methods, chemists will have access to highly reliable and accurate results to predict chemical properties, thereby aiding experimental observations.

James L. Carmon Scholarship

Jason Terry, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is developing technologies that could revolutionize interpretations of telescope data. Recent generations of powerful telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, offer fresh information about the regions where exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system) form. Unfortunately, an exoplanet might be engulfed by dust or other obscuring phenomena, leaving traces in telescope images so subtle that the human eye might not notice or understand them. To address this gap, Terry will use existing astronomical images and high-performance computational resources to generate thousands of simulations of the regions where exoplanets form. He will use simulations to train machine-learning algorithms to help scientists detect exoplanets from real observations and answer new astronomical questions. This research will offer a novel method to estimate masses and locations of exoplanets and change how we search for and characterize them.

James L. Carmon Scholarship Honorable Mention

Benjamin Taylor, an M.S. candidate in the Odum School of Ecology, investigates how ants acquire, retain and retrieve information as a group. Because animal groups often face the same tasks repeatedly, their decisions in foraging and other behaviors could benefit collective learning based on experience. His research explores whether members of a colony of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus can pass information among individuals and progressively improve group performance in foraging over time. Taylor attaches miniature tags to multiple individuals and films them using high-resolution cameras, then deploys the high-resolution video data and advances in computer vision and other technologies to fine-scale track animal movements. He plans to use new analytical approaches to quantify and discriminate between various movement tracks of individual members and groups of ants under different experimental manipulations. The results of his research could advance understanding of collective problem-solving in animal and human societies, potentially with AI applications.