Angela Lee (’26) | Psychology / Computer Science
Angela (she/her) is a 2025 SURF L&S researcher majoring in Psychology and Computer Science. For her SURF project this summer, Angela is researching the topic “EQVision: Affective Tracking of Multiple Characters in Context.”
How did you get interested in the topic of your project?
I started at Cal knowing I wanted to pursue Psychology. I’ve always found studying emotion and decision-making incredibly interesting. During my freshman summer I took CS 61A to learn about coding and ended up realizing a passion for programming and the problem-solving that comes with it. I started exploring both Psychology and CS, and found affective computing and computational psychology to be the best of both worlds. It was then that I met my current mentor at the Whitney Lab, where I had the pleasure of joining as an undergraduate researcher. My mentor introduced me to the ongoing affective projects in the lab, one of which was a computer vision (CV) model for emotion recognition. Over this past year I’ve loved learning about reinforcement learning and CV, and I am excited to now implement my own ideas and research on human perception of emotion into a CV model.
How will the skills you develop through your research fellowship help you achieve your academic and/or professional goals?
My dream career is to go into research and to continue learning and building on projects that will have meaningful, positive impacts on other people’s lives. Through SURF I hope to develop technical and professional skills that will help me grow and achieve my career goals. I’m excited to meet the other students and mentors and to hear about their research and experiences.
What are you almost excited about as you undertake your summer research?
I am most excited to implement my own ideas into my summer research. I have learned a lot about the backend of neural networks and reinforcement learning and about creating visualizations to model the participant data we have for an adjacent research project. Now, I get to apply what I’ve learned and researched and implement my own ideas into the code. I’m excited to put everything together and to apply my knowledge as a psychology major to the computer science aspects of my project as I explore human perception and classification of emotion.