Image: The UGA School of Computing awarded travel grants to two outstanding undergraduate students, Nikita Jha and Ella Wileman, to attend the 2025 Grace Hopper Celebration conference that was held November 4-7, 2025, in Chicago, IL, USA. These travel grants were supported by funds provided by the UGA Parents Leadership Council and the UGA School of Computing. While at the conference, Nikita and Ella had the opportunity to meet representatives from the top tech companies, including NVIDIA, Meta, Two Sigma, IMC Trading, Citadel Securities, and more. They also got to attend workshops on designing Multi-Agent GenAI Architectures, Modeling Geopolitical Risk, Scalable ML Deployment with Kubernetes, and Backend Reliability at Uber. Besides personal benefitting from professional development activities at the event, each student plans to spread the word about what they learned through their student group involvement here at UGA. Nikita Jha is a Foundation Fellow and Stamps Scholar at the University of Georgia, majoring in Computer Science and Economics. Her past research has been at the intersection of machine learning and public sector challenges, such as farmer stress and Alzheimer's Disease. She has also contributed to impactful engineering projects at organizations such as Palantir Technologies, NCR Voyix—where her work on generative AI for self-checkout machines received internal recognition—and the YC-backed startup Azalea Robotics. On campus, Nikita has served as a student leader in ACM, the Corsair Society, UGAHacks, MathCounts Outreach, and Developers on Wall Street. She is passionate about building mission-driven technology and fostering inclusive technical communities.Ella Wileman is a 4th-year Honors student at the University of Georgia, majoring in Computer Science and Data Science with a minor in Statistics. Her internships in the biopharma and healthcare technology industries have focused on optimizing existing software and systems. On campus, she is a UGA Hacks XI Sponsorship Organizer, Student Assistant helping Analyze and Improve Outcome for CSCI 1302 students, and a member of the VIPR CoolDawgs: Wearable Sensors-enabled Heat Stress Tracker and Alert System team. She has received 1st Place at Georgia Statistics Day, the Computing Scholars Research Award, participated in Women in Tech, and served as a Systems Programming TA and Statistical Programming Tutor. Ella has independently pursued research interests in ensemble learning with a focus on model diversity, robotic process automation, and natural language processing. Type of News/Audience: Student Success
