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Sasha Fedchin is a double major in classical studies and computer science. Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, he is interested in machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and ancient languages. For his Senior Project in classics, Sasha explored how Seneca responded to ideas embraced by his predecessors in his tragedies, and employed various dramatic techniques to emphasize his position on a given issue. In particular, he studied Seneca’s use of trimeter, a meter commonly employed for dialogues in ancient drama, and how the trimeter of early Renaissance poets is different from that of Seneca. To conduct a comprehensive analysis of Latin trimeter, Sasha collaborated with the members of the Quantitative Criticism Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, who apply NLP and other statistical approaches to the study of literature and culture.

Sasha’s computer science Senior Project focused on code completion. Broadly, code completion aims to speed up the coding process by predicting what a programmer would want to type next. For his project, Sasha tackled a problem that involved predicting future imports in Java code with the help of graph neural networks. Having been previously involved in NLP research, he is excited to learn more about the ways machine learning can be applied to the study of natural and computer languages. Sasha is delighted to begin his PhD studies this fall in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University.