Valerie Chen '20 Selected as a Snap Research Scholar

03/08/2019
Departments: Computer Science

Valerie Chen, '20 has been selected as a 2019 Snap Research Scholar. 

Snap Inc. selected outstanding students carrying out research in areas of computer science relevant to the company, such as computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, data mining, computational imaging, human-computer interaction, and other related fields. As part of the award, Chen will receive $10,000 and an offer for a full-time paid internship with Snap.

Chen said her application for the Snap Research Scholarship focused on research that she has been involved in both at Yale and previous summer internships, both of which are related to computer vision and machine learning. 

“I find vision a very interesting problem from a psychology and cognitive perspective,” she said. “Working on unsolved, yet extremely relevant, problems is what motivates me to continue doing research.”

At Yale, she has been a part of YDriving, the first initiative at Yale to build self-driving cars, with a focus on safety and security. She has also written about a project she spearheaded on building explainable visual navigation systems for the model self-driving cars. As a research intern at IBM, she worked on vision-related problems for enterprise solutions.

“I believe they selected students whose experiences align with company interests, and since Snap is a camera company and platform, computer vision is definitely something they are looking for people to work on,” she said.