On April 7-8 the Office of Graduate Studies, the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, as well as the Office of Research and Economic Development, held the 2026 Student Research Days Poster Sessions and Creative Exhibitions.
More than 120 graduate students and 200 undergraduate students participated in these sessions in addition to a week-long celebration of student research and creative activity. Graduate students who were awarded competitive prizes for their scholarship and presentation skills received $400 toward travel grants to present their research regionally or nationally as well as support other research costs. Academic colleges sponsored prizes valued at $250 awarded to undergraduates. Additionally, five undergraduate students were recognized by the University Honors Program for their research.
Nearly 100 faculty, staff, postdoc and graduate student volunteer judges met with students during morning and afternoon sessions and evaluated their presentations.
School of Computing students Armon'e Dean and Dakoda Oden received undergraduate college awards for their projects.
Dean, a senior computer science major from Lincoln, was awarded for his project, “Computing Access to Justice in Nebraska: A Reliability-Weighted Dempster-Shafer Framework.”
Oden, a senior computer science major from Auburn, was awarded for his project, “Comparative Evaluation of Fine-Tuning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Local Language Models.”
Both students were advised by Ashley M. Votruba, Leen-Kiat Soh, Ashok Samal, and Deepti Joshi through the university's Undergraduate Creative Activities and Research Experience (UCARE) Program, which supports undergraduates to work with faculty mentors in research or creative activities. Dean and Oden began their projects with School of Computing Professors Soh and Samal through the Nebraska Summer Research Program in 2025 and extended the projects through the current academic year.
Both projects involved working with the Advancing Justice Collaboratory, an interdisciplinary research group led by Votruba, associate professor of psychology, that seeks to integrate technology to promote access to justice. The projects focused on analyzing and ensuring reliability of collected legal data that would be used in justice-focused research and real-world initiatives.
“I really enjoyed working with the Advancing Justice Collaboratory,” Oden said. “It was a group environment, but it was very focused as well. Armon'e and I were working on the computer science side, and others were working on the social science side. It was really interesting to hear all these different perspectives.”
Dean said he was seeking a research project that would blend both areas of study, and he enjoyed being able to use his computing skills to study issues that aligned with his personal passions.
“I have always had a more technical brain, but I grew up in a family that is all involved in humanities,” Dean said. “I was really trying to find a way to bring both of those together, and I think this project has opened up a whole world of applications for me to combine what I know with what I want to do.”
Oden said he also gained valuable knowledge and skills by utilizing resources in the Holland Computing Center. Thanks to HCC’s training workshops and support staff, he was able to learn how to use the Swan supercomputer and other tools to conduct his research.
“I had no idea how to train a local LLM model for this, and now I have every idea how to,” Oden said. “I also know how not to do it, which was something really interesting to learn too.”
More details at: https://news.unl.edu/article/research-days-recognizes-student-research-and-creative-activity