Josh Myers-Dean

Josh Myers-Dean

Computer Science Ph.D. Student at CU Boulder

Josh Myers-Dean

About

I am a third-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado Boulder. My research interests include (semantic, interactive, part) segmentation, few-shot learning, and image captioning. I am grateful to be supported by the National Science Foundation through a GRFP Fellowship, and I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Danna Gurari. I also frequently collaborate with the wonderful folks at Adobe Research.

In the past, I have had the opportunity to intern at The Allen Institute for AI with Dr. Favyen Bastani and Dr. Aniruddha Kembhavi, working on unsupervised learning for remote sensing time series change detection. I have also spent time at Adobe Research, where I worked on interactive segmentation with Dr. Brian Price and Dr. Yifei Fan, as well as at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where I worked on natural/spoken language processing problems and VR applications with Dr. Karl Pazdernik. My undergraduate research at Western Washington University (WWU) included Computational Photography and Geospatial Computer Vision with Dr. Scott Wehrwein, Structural Bioinformatics with Dr. Filip Jagodzinski, and Computer Science Education with Dr. Qiang Hao. While at WWU I worked as a web developer to make websites more accessible.

In my free time I love photography, knitting, trail running, skiing, biking, cooking, and just generally being outside!

Outreach

I am involved with the ITLL at CU Boulder and the I Have a Dream Foundation in North Boulder where I help design tinkering activities using micro:bits to engage middle school students in computing! Please get in touch if you’d like to collaborate on outreach projects.

Grad Application Help

Grad application season is tough and I would be happy to chat with anyone thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs! I can help review materials, share my own materials, or just answer general grad school questions. As a first generation college student I know there are a lot of unspoken rules out there and I would be happy to help anyone navigate them! While it is not perfect, CU Boulder does offer an admission fee waiver for those who are elligible.

GRFP Help

The GRFP has afforded me many opportunities so far so I encourage anyone who is elligible to apply! I am happy to chat about the application process and have made my research statement available on this website. I am also happy to share my reviews and personal statement upon request.

Updates

  • 5/2/2023: Gave a guest lecture for CSCI 5722: Computer Vision about Segment Anything (SAM) and how it has impacted the vision community!
  • 4/7/2023: I received a best “Work In Progress” award (4 winners) for our work on interactive segmentation from our department’s annual research expo as well as a departmental service award!
  • 1/13/2023: I’ll be joining the Allen Institute for AI on the PRIOR team with Favyen Bastani this summer! Excited to be back in Seattle!
  • 11/30/2022: Finished up a great semester of outreach with the ITLP! Keep an eye out for our series of micro:bit activities.
  • 10/11/2022: Work done with folks at WWU, “Computer Vision for International Border Legibility” to appear at WACV 2023!
  • 3/01/2022: I’ll be joining Adobe Research this summer to work on computational photography problems with Brian Price!
  • 2/24/2022: Gave a talk at The Teen Science Cafe about my research, my path to becoming a graduate student, and accessibility!