Daniel F. '65 & Ann H. Sullivan Endowment for Student/Faculty Research

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, conversational AI systems like Chat GPT have emerged as powerful tools for natural language processing and human-computer interactions. My research aims to provide a thorough examination of the strengths and weaknesses of Chat GPT, while also delving into the pervasive issue of biases inherent in various AI models.

The purpose of this project was to analyze and digitize information pertaining to the collection of Mesopotamian burials held at St. Lawrence University under Dr. Mindy Pitre, excavated from Tell Leilan, Syria between 1979 and 1991 under the direction of Yale professor Dr. Harvey Weiss.

It is common to ask what something means, or what someone means by something, but rare to ask what it means for something to mean something. What does ‘meaning’ mean? This is arguably the most fundamental question a human enquirer can ask, and it is quite difficult to answer. The prevailing view in the philosophy of language is that a sentence's meaning is defined by its truth-conditions, or the conditions under which it would be true.

St. Lawrence University is a private institution located in Canton, NY. With around 2,250 students enrolled on campus each year, there are many disciplines, course options, and routes to take for new students. Students may meet with their advisers to help guide them on the correct path of courses, or they may choose to guide themselves. Every student goes through the registration process themselves, however. And every professor is on the receiving end of that registration process. At St. Lawrence there are three days of registration for students.

Archiving the Dub is a project that seeks to historicize and memorialize a theme cottage in St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, called ‘The Dub’, which houses a group of students who engage with feminist activism. Through this project, an attempt is made to trace a genealogy of its members’ missions, interests and activities through the digitization of documents dating back to the 1990s, as well as discussing the significance and contribution of these materials to the identity-building of the group.

Research Question: Can populist political parties in countries with relatively low levels of corruption gain public support using anti-corruption platforms? If so, why does this campaign tactic work? 

In my research fellowship, I looked at the Constructed Language, or "Conlang" Toki Pona, and its popularity in online fandom communities. I discussed how Toki Pona is a a language that strongly adheres to the philosophy that there are no “incorrect” ways to use their language through its linguistic structure, as well as how the speech community surrounding Toki Pona speakers is organized almost entirely online, and how that modifies the traditional understanding of what a speech community is, and how it operates less like a speech community, and more like an online "Fandom".

By conducting in-depth interviews with US college students studying abroad and taking medical courses while abroad, our research team worked to analyze their experiences, including their perceived advantages of the opportunity, disadvantages, and barriers to accessing the opportunity. Additionally, we analyze how the experiences abroad benefit these students in their pathway to achieving post-grad success (specifically within the medical field) compared to students who didn't get to study abroad.  

Sports analytics are a constantly growing field, but little work has been done to incorporate analytics to video games. This summer through my project, I wanted to see if similar tools that are used in professional sports could be applied to sports video games, specifically to predict Rocket League game outcome. I utilized a variety of statistical learning methods to investigate which statistics were most positively or negatively associated with winning, and built a random forest model that classified games as wins/losses correctly with almost 90% accuracy.

“The Digital World and The Modern Undergraduate” discusses research conducted on effects of digital information, assistant software, and generative AI on modern undergraduate students when compared to previous generations. My research considers both the positive and negative aspects of the transition to the digital world, in an attempt to present a full picture of these changes. Some of the programs examined in the paper are Google, Perusall, and ChatGPT. 

This summer I devoted my SLU Fellowship opportunity to immerse in a new art medium. As a double major in Environmental Studies and Studio Art, I am passionate about finding space for intersection between both of my interests and  paper making felt like a perfect opportunity for the exploration of sustainable practices. I was mentored by Velma Bolyard and Melissa Schulenberg in learning the craft. We focused on the use of readily available materials for the production of quality paper. More specifically we utilized paper scraps, plant fibers and recycled cotton t-shirt.

Today, 75% of residential land in the United States is zoned for detached single-family homes. This means that anything other than detached single family homes including apartments, low-income housing, senior living, and student housing are prohibited in these areas. Zoning regulations are the foundation of city planning, making them a fundamental aspect of society to evaluate when assessing the future of our nation.

The goals for this project were to train a convolutional neural network to be able to label game camera images taken in the North Country. Once trained the hope was to use it for Nature Up North projects that involve labeling thousands of images taken each year. Currently these images are labeled by volunteers and this network would be able to at least help sort them faster. At the conclusion of my project, I was able to train two networks – the first sorted images based on any animal presence, and the second sorted images based on animal species.

Ferritin is a kind of protein that exists in the human body with a mix of two different types of molecules called H and L. Diseases such as anemia, cancer, and Alzheimers have been linked to the malfunction of Ferritin in the body. Therefore, research is being conducted to further understand how Ferritin works. We have 2D images of Ferritin, which thanks to a software called Cryo-EM, can be combined to form 3D models of the protein. Unfortunately, the pictures that we have are blurry.

The research conducted for "You're a [Data] Wizard, Harry!" was done through the program of R. Through R, we started with text mining and cleaning of the first Harry Potter film script. From this script and data, we conducted many sentiment analyses for the course of the film and for each individual character. We then applied the sentiment analyses to networks, working to understand the sentiment of dialogue interactions and relationships. Through these analyses, we were able to see the overall connotations for each relationship's dialogue in the first film specifically.

Although they are challenging to see with the naked eye, zooplankton do serve a vital role in an ecosystem. More specifically, we focused on copepods and the nature of their appearance. The pigment that contributes to their coloration is astaxanthin, the purpose of which is possibly for UV protection. We wanted to see how the levels of this pigment related to the location, as well as the time of the year of sampling. It was also important to be able to create a reproducible method for the extraction of astaxanthin, in order to prevent the wasting of material.

Network analysis is the process of analyzing the structure of a network through graphical and statistical procedures. In other words, network analysis looks at how a set of units (nodes) are connected to one another through directional or non-directional links (edges). For my research project, I explored network analysis and investigated through statistical methods how the directional relationship of assists to goals influences winning percentages for Division III Liberty League soccer teams from 2013-2021.

My research this summer studied a portion of the morphine molecule using the Wagner-Jauregg reaction. The final goal of this research is to use the Wagner-Jauregg reaction to synthesize a morphine-like molecule, that could have reduced addictive properties and allow people to use morphine without the risk of addiction. The Wagner-Jauregg reaction involves a double Diels-Alder reaction between a diene and dienophile. This reaction allows us to use cheaper and readily available molecules to synthesize more complex molecules, such as morphine.

Using China’s national and regional data (i.e. Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangdong), this project studied how Covid-19 affects China’s housing market. Main findings included:

I propose that the practice of chemistry often reduces its subject matter into a vacuous form of itself; that we erroneously equate truth values assigned to states of matter with forms so mitigated or changed that they are no longer ontologically dependent on—nor can they feasibly describe—the original substance in question. During this fellowship, I examined objects in general and how their identities and demands on existence affect the types of ontological commitments we can justifiably devote ourselves to.

In Kenya, only 6% of rural women have access to land titles, even though they make up approximately 96% of the agricultural labor force. This gap is critical because, in Kenya, the land is an indicator of social status. Moreover, agriculture in Kenya contributes to almost a quarter of the national GDP. This research aimed to understand the significant impacts of the gender gap in land ownership and control on Kenyan rural women’s economic and personal empowerment.

I analyzed the theme of psychological repression in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Zadie Smith’s NW, exploring how, despite the apparent progress in British society during the nearly 90 years between their publications, the same problem still surfaces.

During the duration of her fellowship, Sam read and analyzed six of Shakespeare’s Roman and Greek plays. She also researched a variety of methodologies including, feminism, new historicism, and marxism. Her research into various methodologies showed her a variety of critical methods from which to approach writing her article, so that she could combine them to create her own unique methodology.

How does the politicization of ethnicity impact government minority development efforts in East and Southeast Asia? 

For my Fellowship this summer I produced and published a collection of four short fiction stories that explored the experience of a Romanian family as they immigrate to the U.S, assimilate, and grow apart as time passes. These stories were inspired by a piece I created for my advanced fiction class in the fall 2021 semester, as well as my own personal experience with my Romanian-American family.