Honors Medalists
Firestone/Golden Medalists from the Symbolic Systems Honors Program
Stanford annually presents awards to recognize excellent honors research by Stanford undergraduates. The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research is given to the top theses in the sciences and engineering, and Robert M. Golden Medal is given to the top theses in the humanities and creative arts.
The most recent medal winner from the Symbolic Systems Honors Program is...
Makiko Fujimoto
Symbolic Systems Program ('14)
Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, 2014
Honors Thesis: Show Me the Features: Regular Viewing Patterns During Encoding and Recognition of Faces, Objects, and Places
Honors Advisor: Kalanit Grill-Spector, Psychology
Second Reader: Tirin Moore, Neurobiology
Firestone Medal Citation:
Makiko Fujimoto's research examines what factors affect the way people scan images containing faces, objects, and indoor scenes. She showed that top-down knowledge plays a key role in determining eye movements and fixation points. Makiko discovered that subjects tend to fixate on particular features that are category-specific, for example, they fixate on eyes and the nose bridge when viewing faces. Surprisingly, she found that the proportion of time subjects fixate on these features varies with the viewing angle of the stimulus. In the process, she mastered many new concepts and scientific methods. These findings are important because they suggest that fixations on images are driven by our prior knowledge as to which features of objects are important and that these fixation patterns mirror the natural viewing patterns of objects in the real world. The implications of these findings are important both for developing effective human-machine interfaces as well as for web design and search.
Previous Symbolic Systems Honors Program Medalists:
The table below lists honors theses in Symbolic Systems that have won university awards since 1995.
| Year | Student | Honors Thesis Title | Honors Advisor | Second Reader | Award |
| 1995 | Jon Lindsay | "A Biological Basis for Being-in-the-World: Autopoesis and Heidegger's Phenomenology" | Jean-Pierre Dupuy | Terry Winograd | Golden |
| 1998 | Jacob Wobbrock | "The Law and Policy of Autonomous Software Agents" | Carey Heckman | Thomas A. Wasow | Golden |
| 1999 | Amy Perfors | "Slow and Steady Doesn't Win the Race: The Relation of Infant Information Processing Skills to Later Linguistic Performance" | Anne Fernald | Zenzi Griffin | Firestone |
| 2000 | Joan Chiao | "Do They All Look Alike?: An fMRI Study on Race and Face Perception" | Jennifer Eberhardt | John Gabrieli | Firestone |
| 2001 | William Barkis | "A New Insight into a Fundamental Neural Mechanism of Learning, Memory and Neuron Death: Understanding the Regulation of NMDA Receptor Expression" | Ben Barres | Erik Ullian | Firestone |
| 2002 | Barry Wark | "The Biology of Developing Complex Neural Network Architectures: Integration of Neural Activity by Astrocytes in Regulating Formation of Synapses in vitro" | Ben Barres | Erik Ullian & Stephen Smith | Firestone |
| 2003 | Deena Skolnick | "Interactions Between Mutual Exclusivity and Lexical Contrast in Word Learning" | Ellen Markman | Anne Fernald | Firestone |
| 2005 | Gregory Wayne | "Order and Word Order: How the Information Content of a Word in a Sentence Helps Explain a Linguistic Universal" | David Beaver | Thomas A. Wasow | Firestone |
| 2006 | Michael Bernstein | "Taskposé: A Dynamic Task-Based Window Management Aid" | Jeff Shrager | Terry Winograd | Firestone |
| 2007 | Gabriel Recchia | "STRATA: Search Tools for Richly Annotated and Time-Aligned Linguistic Data" | Joan Bresnan | Thomas A. Wasow | Firestone |
| 2008 | David Hall | "Tracking the Evolution of Science" | Daniel Jurafsky | Christopher Manning | Firestone |
| 2009 | Anna Schapiro | "A Connectionist Model of a Continuous Developmental Transition in the Balance Scale Task" | James McClelland | Anthony Wagner | Firestone |
| 2011 | Justine Kao | "A Computational Analysis of Poetic Craft in Contemporary Professional and Amateur Poetry" | Daniel Jurafsky | Christopher Potts | Golden |
| 2014 | Makiko Fujimoto | "Show Me the Features: Regular Viewing Patterns During Encoding and Recognition of Faces, Objects, and Places" | Kalanit Grill-Spector | Tirin Moore | Firestone |