Drew University

Ida Behreini is a blind Computer Science major from New Jersey’s Drew University. Alongside her Seeing Eye Dog named Evie, Ida enjoys travelling, reading, and playing fetch with her guide dog. She is avidly interested in the areas of Human Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision. Ida spent summer 2017 at Texas A&M University conducting undergraduate research on Information Extraction, a subcategory of Natural Language Processing. Using the English GIgaword data set, which provides over 9 million news wire documents, she sought to automate the retrieval of ‘Event Nouns’. Her algorithm attempted to detect words such as ‘wedding’, ‘conference’’, and ‘graduation’ by identifying new linguistic patterns and analyzing syntactic structures. Additionally, she worked on developing a system to score these nouns based on frequency and diversity. As a Dean’s List student, Ida consistently works hard to achieve her dream of building a more inclusive and accessible world.