Hi! I’m Kajal, a Stamps Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying for my Bachelor’s in Computer Science with minors in Statistics and Psychology. My interests lie in computational social science; specifically, how computer vision, machine learning, and data analytics can enable more equitable experiences in domains such as education and medicine.

As part of the Computing Education Research Area, I am advised by Geoffrey Herman. My research in this group focuses on enhancing classroom learning experiences for engineering students to prioritize long-term retention and intrinsic motivation to learn over immediate performance. Specifically, I study how modifications of testing regimens, such as the introduction of second-chance examinations, can lead to trade-offs between studying behavior, exam performance, and mental health.

Additionally, as part of the Perception and Language (PLAN) Lab and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, I am advised by Ismini Lourentzou. Here, I conduct research at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, focusing on open vocabulary scene graph generation. This involves creating detailed visual representations of scenes by identifying objects and their relationships, addressing challenges like limited vocabularies and biases in traditional models. By leveraging large vision-language models with advanced semantic generalization and few-shot learning capabilities, I aim to enhance applications such as image retrieval, robotics, and visual question answering while improving the understanding and labeling of novel or rare entities.

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