Two CM graduate students were recognized with Best Speaker Awards at the Fall 2025 CM Research Presentation event for their outstanding research and presentations.
Omar Hayat received the award for their presentation “TinyTrail: A Lightweight Model for Contrail Risk Nowcasting.” Omar’s work introduced a lightweight transformer-based model for predicting aircraft contrail risk, a key factor in mitigating the climate impact of air travel, with a focus on the model's prediction capabilities and architectural decisions that enable it to learn complex dynamical-system relationships
Alex Starr received the award for their presentation “A Deep Neural Network for Pricing American Options under Jump-Diffusion in High Dimension: A Backward Stochastic Differential Equation Approach.” Alex’s research demonstrated how a deep learning-based BSDE approach preserves the accuracy of classical methods while enabling scalable pricing of jump models in high dimensions, effectively overcoming the curse of dimensionality faced by traditional PIDE and lattice methods.
Congratulations to Omar and Alex on this well-deserved recognition, and to all participating students on their excellent presentations.