Firestone Medal: Jñani Crawford ('20)
Congratulations to Jñani Crawford (Class of 2020) for being awarded a Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for his Honors thesis, Validation and Generalization of Pixel-wise Relevance in CNNs Trained for Face Classification. Jñani was advised by Prof. Kalanit Grill-Spector (Psychology), and his second reader was Sonia Poltoratski (Psychology).
Here is the Firestone Medal Citation:
Jñani’s thesis characterizes how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained for face recognition make their decisions. CNN-enabled face recognition has gained extensive usage and prominence in broader society, making it critical for us to understand how such networks make decisions. Jñani’s results are novel and important as they quantify for the first time the impact of the training regime on the utility of facial features. This project has resulted not only in an impressive undergraduate thesis, but further in a publication-worthy contribution to the fields of neuroscience and computer science.
Jñani’s thesis characterizes how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained for face recognition make their decisions. CNN-enabled face recognition has gained extensive usage and prominence in broader society, making it critical for us to understand how such networks make decisions. Jñani’s results are novel and important as they quantify for the first time the impact of the training regime on the utility of facial features. This project has resulted not only in an impressive undergraduate thesis, but further in a publication-worthy contribution to the fields of neuroscience and computer science.