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KRANIUM Participant Page

Welcome! This page will have the resources and information for the Kempner Research in Artificial & Natural Intelligence for Undergraduates with Mentorship (KRANIUM) students.

Kempner Research in Artificial & Natural Intelligence for Undergraduates with Mentorship (KRANIUM)

KRANIUM is a 10-week summer program sponsored by the Kempner Institute as part of the Harvard Summer Undergraduate Research Village (HSURV). KRANIUM aims to provide a formative and substantive research experience for — and build community among — a small cohort of Harvard College undergraduates interested in the study of natural and artificial intelligence.

Learn more about KRANIUM

Quick Links


Logistics

The Kempner Institute is located on the 6th floor of the Harvard University Science and Engineering Complex (SEC).

Address:
150 Western Avenue,
Allston, MA 02134

All KRANIUM events will take place in the Kempner Conference Room (6.242) in the East wing unless otherwise noted.

Shuttles:

Harvard provides free shuttles to get around campus. You can see where on the map of Harvard Shuttle Stops.

Note: Kempner Institute’s stop is the bottom, middle stop called SEC. It is on the green Quad Stadium Express line, the purple Quad SEC Direct line, and the red Allston Loop line.

You will receive the first $1000 as soon as possible after being set up in Harvard’s procurement system, Buy2Pay.

You will receive the remaining $2000 in early July.

Register for Buy2Pay

Buy2Pay is the procurement system we use to pay your stipends. 

To set up your account with Buy2Pay, contact Lani O’Donnell, and she will send you a supplier registration invitation via email that will come from ap_supplieronboarding@harvard.edu. See the detailed description of the registration process here. Harvard will review your registration details and notify you if anything is missing. You can expect this process to take about a week to complete from start to finish.

When completing your registration, please select the electronic payment option (Zelle). This is the fastest way to receive payment and safeguards us from having to track down and replace paper checks if they are lost in the mail. 

 After your profile is setup and confirmed, you can use this link to login*Note: Foreign Individuals (Non-U.S. Citizens) may also be required to submit additional information to ensure compliance with U.S. regulations. New registrants may receive a separate email from Harvard’s Online Tax Compliance System, Sprintax Calculus (hutax@sprintax.com), after their Buy2Pay registration has been submitted. The link they send will only remain active for 24 hours so please respond quickly.  You may set up a 1:1 appointment to get help with completing the Sprintax questionnaire and uploading required documents.

Stipend Financial Policy

To learn more about the tax and financial policies of your stipend, please see the following resources:

• There is a training and slide deck held on 4/17/24 that has some nice quick reference charts that may be helpful. See the main policy page under What’s New for the slide deck and recording.
• They also have a full written policy – Fellowship Payments and Reimbursements for Students and Non-employee Postdocs/Fellows | Financial Policy Office (harvard.edu)
General Fellowship Information Brochure has some frequently asked questions.
Fellowships Toolkit – Appendix B gives a more detailed breakdown on tax and reporting requirements that is a good reference.

Please refer to the HSURV handbook for information about housing, dining, and contacts for questions not addressed in the handbook.

You should receive an email invitation to the Kempner workspace. If you don’t, try logging into the Harvard Enterprise grid in order to see the Kempner workspace. 

Please monitor the private kranium2025 channel and use it to chat/ask questions!

If you’re using the cluster, please make sure you join and monitor the cluster-users channel

Denise Yoon: Thursdays 12pm, Room 6.231 (message to schedule Zoom if you can’t come in person)

Lani O’Donnell: Wednesdays 2pm, Room 6.149 (message to schedule Zoom if you can’t come in person)

July 4th is a holiday. We may approve up to 3 other days off if your mentor approves, it isn’t a Wednesday, and it is not too many consecutive days off in a row. Please email Lani about vacation requests.

Events

Wednesday, June 11thOrientation
Mentor Lunch
Wednesday, June 18thCompute Cluster Onboarding
Wednesday, June 25thPresenting Your Research Pt. 1
Wednesday, July 2ndIndustry Talk
Wednesday, July 9thFaculty Talks
Wednesday, July 16thGraduate School Panel
Wednesday, July 23rdPresenting Your Research Pt. 2
Wednesday, July 30thTBD
Wednesday, August 6thPoster Session

HSURV will be communicating all announcements and events on Canvas. Please reach out and let us know if you do not have access.

Towards the end of the program, we will have a poster session where KRANIUM students will present posters of their research. Information on the poster session will be updated throughout the summer.

At the end of summer, you’ll fill out a short final report that consists of your abstract and a brief personal reflection.

Meet the 2025 KRANIUM Participants

Victoria Chen

Class Year: 2028

Primary Mentor: Ashley Thomas

Project Title: What’s in a Look? Infant Eye-Gaze and the Role of Collaborative Understanding in Human Intelligence

Hannah Kim

Class Year: 2026

Primary Mentor: Binxu Wang

Project Title: Diffusion Models and their Relational Compositions

Simon Ma

Class Year: 2026

Primary Mentor: Isabel Papadimitriou

Project Title: Investigating a Phonetic Subspace in Self-Supervised Speech Models

Ian Moore

Class Year: 2026

Primary Mentor: Susan Murphy

Project Title: Non-Interpolated Action Generalization In Meta Reinforcement Learning

Laasya Nagumalli

Class Year: 2028

Primary Mentor: Naomi Saphra

Project Title: Nonlinear Feature Interference

John Rho

Class Year: 2025

Primary Mentor: Kiante Brantley

Project Title: Guided Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Control Tasks

Carl Scandelius

Class Year: 2027

Primary Mentor: Haim Sompolinsky

Project Title: Separability Properties of General Perceptual Manifolds

Vincent Song

Class Year: 2028

Primary Mentor: Sam Gershman

Project Title: Inducing Meta-Generalisation in Machines

Alexandru-Raul Todoran

Class Year: 2028

Primary Mentor: Eran Malach

Project Title: Internalizing Branching Reasoning in Language Models: Toward Implicit and Parallel Exploration

Eric Xu

Class Year: 2028

Primary Mentor: Venkatesh Murthy

Project Title: Developing Models for Olfactory Perception

Gavin Ye

Class Year: 2028

Primary Mentor: Nada Amin

Project Title: Agentic AI for Automated Drug Design

Todd Zhou

Class Year: 2027

Primary Mentor: Mengyu Wang

Project Title: Evaluating and Enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) for Fair and Accurate Medical Image Diagnosis

Past KRANIUM Participants

Ege Cakar
Primary Mentor: Cengiz Pehlevan
Project Title: Introducing Logical Thinking into Neural Networks

Emma Finn
Primary Mentor: Manos Theodosis
Project Title: Learning Artistic Signatures: Symmetry Discovery for Style Transfer

Ely Hahami
Primary Mentor: Kazuki Irie
Project Title: Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory

Kayla Huang
Primary Mentor: David Brandfonbrener
Project Title: Enhancing natural language capabilities of AI through hybrid MoE and GSSM models

Lavik Jain
Primary Mentor: Yasha Ektefaie
Project Title: Predicting Antibiotic Resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis with Interpretable Machine Learning

Justin Ji
Primary Mentor: Kenneth Li
Project Title: AttackVis: A visualization playground for large language models in response to adversarial attacks

Xiang Yi Sean Meng
Primary Mentor: Dr. Kevin Mastro
Project Title: Informing ML Explore/Exploit Balance through Insights from Age-Dependent PFC Circuit Modulation

Aneesh Muppidi
Primary Mentor: Wilka Carvalho
Project Title: Unsupervised Agent Discovery using Object-Centric Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Anne Mykland
Primary Mentor: Naomi Saphra
Project Title: Feature Compression and Direction Similarity in Neural Language Modeling

Alliyah Steele
Primary Mentor: Morgan Talbot
Project Title: Integrative Analysis and Predictive Modeling of Linguistic Brain Function Using LLMs

Johnathan Sun
Primary Mentor: Sammy Jelassi
Project Title: Search Algorithms and Value Functions in Programming Puzzles