2022-2023 Vanguard Scholars Announced
Congratulations to Carlos Ayala Bellido and Vincelot Ravoson, Vanguard Scholars for the 2022-23 academic year! (Information on the 2021-22 awardees previously announced here.)
The Vanguard Scholars program, established in 2021 in memory of Annie J. Easley, supports and promotes rising stars in the field of computer science, data science, and computational mathematics. Easley (1933 – 2011) was a computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist at the NASA Lewis Research Center. She was a leading member of the team that developed software for the Centaur rocket stage. ICME established the scholarship with the generous support of Vanguard Fintech Ventures.
Carlos Ayala Bellido is a first-year M.S. student at ICME. He received his bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in May of 2022, where he graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Business Administration. On top of being a Vanguard Scholar, Carlos is also a GEM Employer Fellow, sponsored by the National GEM Consortium and Cadence Design Systems. Carlos primarily works in software development, spending the past three summers as a software engineering intern with Uber and Cadence Design Systems. His personal interests include computational neuroscience and computer security, both results of the interdisciplinary coursework he completed during and prior to his undergraduate studies. Apart from his academics, Carlos prides himself on his work in the diversity, equity and inclusion space. Serving as a four-term executive board member in CMU's Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) chapter, most recently as chapter president, Carlos worked together with both CMU administration and student organizations within CMU and the University of Pittsburgh, helping form stronger connections within the Latino and Hispanic communities and pushing for more unity within leadership of these groups.
Vincelot Ravoson is a first-year M.S. student at ICME. He received his undergraduate degree in engineering from CentraleSupélec in France. His passion for research in data science and applied mathematics was born during a research project in market design between 2019 and 2021, aiming to study new auction mechanisms in financial markets to improve the stock price formation process. Following this first research experience, Vincelot pursued his interest in machine learning and financial regulation through an internship at the Financial Markets Authority in France, during which he developed new classification tools on large databases to improve the knowledge of financial market participants and reduce the number of false market abuse alerts. Then, Vincelot completed a second internship in the Data & Artificial Intelligence lab of BNP Paribas in Luxembourg, during which he developed new indicators to improve the explainability of the clustering and supervised classification models used by the bank. During the summer of 2022, he completed a quantitative finance internship at Bank of America in London where he worked on parameter recalibration and optimization algorithms used to price inflation derivatives. In addition to his passion for data science, Vincelot is also passionate about sociology and anthropology, and has several podcast channels in which he investigates various human behaviors and cultural practices in our contemporary societies. In the future, Vincelot hopes to use his knowledge in computational engineering and data science to contribute to social good and better understand the dynamics of our societies.
