SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Diya TV) — Eight students, two of them Indian Americans, have been selected by the Computing Research Association (CRA) as recipients of the 2024-2025 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for outstanding work in computing research.
Two of the students, Venkataram Sivaram from the University of California, San Diego, and Prasann Singhal from the University of Texas at Austin, have been selected for the highly competitive award. Both students will be given a maximum of $1,500 in funding to travel to a conference of their choice to present their research and meet other professionals in their line of work.
Sivaram, a computer science major with a mathematics minor, is the first student from UC San Diego to win the award. His research under the mentorship of Professor Ravi Ramamoorthi is in graphics, visualization, and computational geometry. He has helped speed up rendering techniques for complex scenes for video games and movies, and his research has been displayed at the ACM SIGGRAPH symposium. Sivaram is also a Junior Counselor at the Rose Mathematics Program and a computer graphics tutor.
Singhal, a double major in computer science and linguistics at UT Austin, researches artificial intelligence and machine learning. His research is focused on enhancing text generation in large language models by discovering the boundaries of reinforcement learning from human feedback and creating a new fine-tuning method. His work aside from research, Singhal is an officer at the Laurel Co-operative housing community and the founder of the Katy HACK Initiative, which teaches computer science to younger students.
Founded in 1972, CRA supports computing research, informs policymakers, and fosters diversity in the field through mentorship, advocacy, and collaboration. The CRA Awards 2025 are sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Presented annually, the awards recognize undergraduate students at North American universities who demonstrate outstanding research capabilities and a commitment to advancing computing.
