COLIN MacRAE

Thesis: NOLEdge: Creating an Intelligent Search Tool for the Florida State University Computer Science Department Using Fine-tuned Transformers and Data Augmentation

Thesis Director:  Dr. Sonia Haiduc, Department of Computer Science

"I learned about the Bess. H Ward Honors Thesis Award after speaking with my advisor about seeking funding to accomplish my project. My thesis required use of heavy duty computers which could be powerful enough to train and host an AI model to answer questions about the Computer Science department’s website. These services were offered through big-name companies or services like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Elasticsearch Database - and they were all pretty expensive considering the scope of the project was individual research and not some enterprise application. Nonetheless, being able to afford these services made a huge difference in not only the quality of my research, but also the quantity; I was able to finish a lot more in a lot less time. Thanks to the funding I was awarded, I was able to achieve some really cool results and deal with more computationally intense models, which eventually lead me to discover the area of interest that I will now be pursuing in my graduate studies. This is all to say that if it weren’t for the funding (and certainly HITM), I wouldn’t have all of the incredible opportunities I’ve been presented today. I am grateful to Florida State University and the Honors Program in general for making it so easy for me to seek out funding so I could take my project, my education, and my research career to the next level."

-Colin MacRae, Fall 2021 Bess H. Ward Thesis Award Winner