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The preliminary rounds of the 6th Annual Grad Slam wrap up with round 8. This is your last chance to get out the vote to help your favorite presenters advance to the semifinal rounds! Check out a preview of the presentations and be sure to follow us on Facebook for live updates on the winners of each round.

By Daina Tagavi, Professional Development Peer
Thursday, April 12th, 2018 - 8:00am




The 6th Annual Grad Slam continues with prelim round 8. Remember to get out the vote to help your favorite presenters advance to the semifinal rounds! Check out a preview of the presentations below, and be sure to follow us on Facebook for live updates on the winners of each round.

ROUND 8
Fri Apr 13 | 3-4p
​UCen State Street Room

Audrey Abeyta | Communication
Where You At?: The Role of Geospatial Concordance in Assessments of Online Credibility
In an increasingly connected world, individuals can share information with others without regard for geographical distance; as a result, an individual's physical location is seeming less important than ever before. However, the results of our experiment indicate that individuals consider the geographic location of a reviewer when assessing the credibility of their online reviews.

Colette King | Technology Management
Big Data: How it is Received by a Traditional Industry
My topic will go into my research about the power of Big Data and the potential is offers to traditional industries such as Property Management while explaining the clash between new and traditional practices. I will touch on the delicate balance required to convince users in a traditional industry to utilize a new innovation (Big Data) to their advantage while mystifying the term "Big Data."

Gokul Prasath Nallasami | Electrical & Computer Engineering
Hardware Acceleration: Are We There Yet?
Machine Learning has been shaping the future from identifying our sentiments to predicting natural anomalies. With tons of data in our hand, processing data and timely response are becoming a key challenge. Hardware accelerators are increasingly seen in recent times, to accelerate the Machine Learning applications with dedicated hardware. Are we there yet to provide cost effective solutions as like how mobile revolution has shaped the way we communicate?

Rae Taylor-Burns | Environmental Science & Management
The Other CO2 Problem: Data Gaps and Hotspots in Ocean Acidification
The California Current ecosystem is one of the worlds' most vulnerable regions to ocean acidification. Scientists up and down the coast are working to understand this important problem, but because the California Current region is so large, massive data gaps still exist. Locating data gaps as well as ocean acidification hotspots will help scientists and marine managers target their efforts to understand the problem and increase marine ecosystem resiliency to acidification in an era of climate change.

Steve Trettel | ​Mathematics
The Shape of Geometry
Geometry is the study of shapes. But for two centuries now we have known there is more than one type of geometry, more than one type of rules that shapes can follow. These different flavors of geometry fit together themselves to form a shape whose points represent different possible worlds. I'll talk here about my attempt to do geometry on the shape of geometries!

Zhiwei Zhang | Electrical & Computer Engineering
Bring Touch to Virtual Reality
Touch is an essential sensory modular. However, touch feedback is absent in virtual reality devices. ReTouch Lab at UCSB is trying to embed touch feedback into VR.