Jennifer Yang
Infants have an understanding of others’ goals and intentions that emerges very early in development, but it is unclear if AI has the same abilities. This project compares social reasoning in human infants and large language models (LLMs) by converting classic developmental psychology studies into text prompts to evaluate LLMs. This project will provide insight into whether LLMs and humans have comparable social reasoning abilities, and, if not, illuminate possible deficits in LLMs’ social reasoning capabilities. This summer, I will assist with designing and running prompting experiments with LLMs and […]
Madeline Denham
A study of the evidence for the status of women in the Mycenaean culture during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1100 BCE). I will be investigating archaeological, bio-archaeological, and iconographic evidence to understand the socio-political differences, if any, based on age, class, and health status. I will perform an analysis of the possible significance to the current project I’ll be working on this summer at Tsoungiza.
Alessia Cis
The Center For Tebtunis Papyri (CTP) received back thousands of papyrus fragments from Oxford belonging to the 1899 Grenfell and Hunt excavation in Tebtunis (Egypt). These fragments survive in various sizes and qualities, and are written in a number of different ancient languages. This summer I will catalog them by inventorying them, identifying the language, describing any notable features, and foldering them. I will also begin imaging the papyri for the online database. With this work, the CTP will be able to offer new research materials for scholars around the […]
Amelia Cahill
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is able to find and measure many more quasars than its predecessor programs such as Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Not only can DESI look at more quasars, it can observe quasars much further away (at higher redshift) than we ever could before. My goal this summer, which is a culmination of 3 semesters of work so far, is to determine a representative “average” DESI quasar and examine its properties. This project aims to increase our knowledge of the “Lyman-alpha forest” (a region of a quasar’s […]
Audrey Nguyen
Our project aims to create a more connected and comprehensive body of documentation regarding the movements of 15th- and 16th- century European musicians. Though there is a large amount of existing scholarship about these figures, much of it is scattered and difficult to sort through when conducting research. To rectify this issue, our team has been building a database of musicians and their associates, the entries from which are being used to create a mapping tool that tracks the details and activities of recorded individuals. Streamlining the process of finding […]
Christian Aquino
I seek to research and document the experiences of incarcerated Japanese-Americans who, following the passing of the 1944 Denaturalization Act during the Second World War, were coerced or tricked into renouncing their U.S. citizenship. In particular, I hope to document the experiences of those individuals who, upon renouncing their citizenship, either faced undue mistreatment or even deportation (maybe labeled as repatriation). Some of these Japanese-Americans are included in a group known as Strandees, or Japanese-Americans who were unable to return to the U.S. during the war; yet another group of […]
Daisy Judith Morales
For this summer research, I am contributing to a comparative study of two patterns of pro-abortion activism in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The first focuses on efforts to liberalize abortion laws through both social movements and legislative advocacy. The second examines the work of autonomous feminist collectives that support pregnant individuals in the self-management of abortion, particularly in contexts where abortion is not legally accessible. As part of this project, I work with structured interviews conducted with activists involved in one or both forms of activism. My role includes reviewing […]
Jeremy Holl
While Honduran public property records can be accessed individually online, right now there is no publicly available complete dataset of such records with which to conduct analysis. Using existing public records, my mentor and I have created a database of Honduran property records. This summer, my work will focus on linking and reconciling records, deduplicating entries, and establishing checks for data quality and unique keys. I intend to refine this dataset with the ultimate goal to better understand property and wealth distribution in Honduras. I also hope to gain insights […]
Isabella Canales
This summer, I am pursuing research in extreme physiological phenomena that cannot be explained by known biological mechanisms and attempting to replicate such phenomena using classical and non-classical systems. I will work with model organisms such as planarians, which have regenerative capabilities, and can be split into identical versions of themselves. I will design experiments with planarians to study their biological capabilities and communication.
Jocelyn Liu
This summer, I will be analyzing the impact of short-term rentals (STRs) in rural Ontario and the regulatory responses to them, contextualized by the growing housing crisis in Canada. STRs are often economic keystones for small municipalities reliant on tourism, and create unique tensions between economic development, housing affordability, and municipal governance. The project will expand the existing body of literature on STR markets that primarily focus on large urban cores but are increasingly shaping rural/semi-rural housing markets and the people who experience these shifts in their everyday lives.