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 kranium2024 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

Ella Batty: Tuesdays 3pm, Room 6.110 (message to schedule Zoom if you can’t come in person)

Lani O’Donnell: Thursdays 3pm, 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 Tuesday, and it is not too many consecutive days off in a row. Please email Lani about vacation requests.

Events

Monday, June 10thOrientation
Mentor Lunch
Tuesday, June 11thCompute Cluster Onboarding
(mandatory for those using Kempner cluster)
Tuesday, June 18thElevator Pitches Development Session
Tuesday, June 25thOverview of NeuroAI
Tuesday, July 2ndJonathan Frankle Research Talk & Q&A
Tuesday, July 9thApplying to PhD Programs
Tuesday, July 16thIlenna Jones Research Talk & Q&A
Tuesday, July 23rdScientific Poster Guidelines
Tuesday July 30thDavid Alvarez-Melis Talk & Q&A
Tuesday, August 6thNo Session
Thursday, August 8thPoster Session

Sunday, June 9th 5:00pmHSURV Opening Dinner
Tuesday, June 13th 7:30-9:00pmResponsible Conduct in Research Training
Late JuneAbstract Writing Workshop
Late JulyPublic Speaking Practicum
Thursday, August 8th, 5pmHSURV Closing Dinner

Materials and Deliverables

We will be using a Google Drive to share resources. You will be given permission, and can access the drive here: KRANIUM 2024 Shared Resources.

If you don’t have access, please email Lani to make sure you get added.

You will be writing an abstract to be featured in the HSURV book. You can check out this book from last year here. The tentative deadline is July 17th – more information will be coming soon.

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 2024 KRANIUM Participants

Ege Cakar

Class Year: First Year

Primary Mentor: Cengiz Pehlevan

Project Title: Introducing Logical Thinking into Neural Networks

Emma Finn

Class Year: Sophomore

Primary Mentor: Manos Theodosis

Project Title: Learning Artistic Signatures: Symmetry Discovery for Style Transfer

Ely Hahami

Class Year: First Year

Primary Mentor: Kazuki Irie

Project Title: Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory

Kayla Huang

Class Year: Senior

Primary Mentor: David Brandfonbrener

Project Title: Enhancing natural language capabilities of AI through hybrid MoE and GSSM models

Lavik Jain

Class Year: First Year

Primary Mentor: Yasha Ektefaie

Project Title: Predicting Antibiotic Resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis with Interpretable Machine Learning

Justin Ji

Class Year: Sophmore

Primary Mentor: Kenneth Li

Project Title: AttackVis: A visualization playground for large language models in response to adversarial attacks

Xiang Yi Sean Meng

Class Year: Sophomore

Primary Mentor: Dr. Kevin Mastro

Project Title: Informing ML Explore/Exploit Balance through Insights from Age-Dependent PFC Circuit Modulation

Aneesh Muppidi

Class Year: Junior

Primary Mentor: Wilka Carvalho

Project Title: Unsupervised Agent Discovery using Object-Centric Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Anne Mykland

Class Year: First Year

Primary Mentor: Naomi Saphra

Project Title: Feature Compression and Direction Similarity in Neural Language Modeling

Alliyah Steele

Class Year: Sophomore

Primary Mentor: Morgan Talbot

Project Title: Integrative Analysis and Predictive Modeling of Linguistic Brain Function Using LLMs

Johnathan Sun

Class Year: Sophomore

Primary Mentor: Sammy Jelassi

Project Title: Search Algorithms and Value Functions in Programming Puzzles