Eesha Barua

Year in School
Junior

Major
Computer Science + Linguistics

Research Interests

Research Mentor
Prof. Heng Ji and Revanth Gangi Reddy

Research/Engagement Experience
Previously, I have been a Software Developer for Hack4Impact and completed research under Professor Roxana Girju where I used NLP to understand the behavior of sensory modalities in the language of guided meditation.

Interests
Eating dark chocolate, Baking (with dark chocolate), and Reading (preferably with dark chocolate)

Project Title
TBD

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
I've always loved organizing the data of my life into different structures (to-do lists, then bullet journals, and now Notion tables) and CS is the science of experimenting with that kind of data.

What social interests matter to me?
I am passionate about climate change and saving the environment, and I believe emergent technology's prerogative should be to prevent global boiling. I'm also a big advocate for diversity and inclusion for women and nonbinary people in CS, and more generally, taking down barriers toward studying CS and software development.

What is my most impactful college experience?
This previous semester, I was a software developer on a project TORIIS, which is an interactive and dynamic web interface to visualize U of I’s investment portfolio, with a focus on assets invested in corporations that profit from the emission of fossil fuels and a goal to persuade the university to fully divest from fossil fuels. This project was incredibly empowering because I was able to make an impact onto our local community here at the university, and participate in climate activism. You can sign our open letter urging divestment at https://www.toriis.earth/take-action.

These are a few of my favorite things!
Dark chocolate, matcha, brown butter, tamarind, and vanilla

Research Description
I will be focusing on information retrieval systems that utilize lang-chaining. This involves replicating the DSPy tool and optimizing task-ready lang-chaining models.

Biography
I was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina and have since lived coincidentally in cities that start with