High School STEM Researcher and YWCC Mentor to Present at ACM SIGGRAPH Conference

Alexander Chen, a sophomore at Morris Hill High School, and Assistant Professor Tomer Weiss in the Ying Wu College of Computing’s (YWCC) Department of Informatics will present their research at the 2025 ACM SIGGRAPH conference (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques), August 10-14 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The conference is considered the most prestigious in the areas of computer graphics, visualization and AI.

Chen began working with Weiss during summer 2024 as part of NJIT’s High School STEM Research Program. The highly competitive program is designed to inspire students to appreciate the value of discovery and innovation as a path to pursue a career in science. Accepted students are paired with a faculty mentor and a research team consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs.

Weiss’s research team devised a method to investigate flaws in crowd simulation algorithms. Such simulations focus on how to create and move groups of virtual humans for purposes ranging from entertainment applications, military simulation, architectural design and robotics, particularly for safety and evacuation.

According to Weiss, modeling and simulating crowd dynamics is computationally complex due to multiple individual identities acting independently. The team’s research discovered that well-known state-of-the-art algorithms that are popular in industry and software tools occasionally fail in basic settings, which is a significant, but undocumented issue.

The SIGGRAPH work will design more robust algorithms and discuss potential solutions which can easily be integrated into the specified simulation crowds.

“Alex had to achieve several milestones in a short period of time,” said Weiss. “We started with a self-study of the research topics, where he had to complete the homework my undergraduate students do in class. This determines the research direction based on the high school student’s skillset in alignment with an ongoing project in one of our labs. By the time they are actually doing the research, it leaves about one month given the tight summer program.”

Weiss sees the program as a win-win for NJIT researchers and the participating high school students, which gives them a unique inside perspective into the research process early on in their academic journey.

Chen fostered his fascination with computer science during fifth grade, learning Scratch, and then moving on to Python and C++. His interest in exploring research fields inspired him to apply to NJIT’s STEM Research Program, an experience he feels has been invaluable.

“After reading Dr. Weiss’s papers on collision avoidance and understanding the problems with current algorithms, I had to create a solution,” he said. “Then I had to test the solution’s effectiveness in many scenarios against those current algorithms. Finally, I synthesized all my findings and the solution into a poster presentation.”

He credits Weiss with guiding him throughout the entire process and is excited about the prospect of delivering a formal research presentation at a premiere industry conference toward the end of the summer.