Get Recognized for Your Research
The University of Mary Washington provides unique opportunities for undergraduates to pursue graduate-level research. Because UMW students are recognized for their research, alumni are poised to enter the nation's most prestigious graduate programs or embark upon engaging career paths. Billy Ella's research has been recognized through publication in a leading computer science journal.
When it comes to watermarking and covert messages, William “Billy” Ella knows how it’s done. The senior computer science and math double major even has written an article on the subject, known as steganography or the science of hiding information, published in the Association for Computing Machinery publication Crossroads.
The article was based on Ella’s undergraduate research project from the spring 2008 semester. With his faculty adviser, computer science professor Dr. Ernest Ackermann, Ella designed an experiment that applied steganography to the Wikipedia image database. Although he didn’t find any hidden messages on Wikipedia, his research showed that looking for the messages on a large scale is possible.
The Roanoke, Va., native had the opportunity to present his findings at the 2008 National Conference on Undergraduate Research at Salisbury University.
At the conference, “I spoke to people with all types of backgrounds, some who had no clue what I was talking about and some who knew a great deal,” Ella said. “I even met one person who used Wikipedia to send hidden information, just like I speculated could happen!”
Ella is one of 150 UMW students who received undergraduate research grants during the 2007-2008 school year. The students represented 17 different academic departments on a wide range of subjects.
In addition to his individual research, Ella worked on a math research project at Lafayette College during the summer of 2008 and a computer science project at UMW’s Summer Science Institute in 2007.
“Mary Washington gave me the chance to explore an interesting topic and to work with a professor individually,” Ella said.
Because of his diverse research experience, it is not surprising that Ella received an honorable mention for the Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Award of 2009.
He’s president of Pi Mu Epsilon, the math honor society, as well as the UMW chapter of the Mathematics Association of America.
Ella recently applied to graduate programs in math and is looking toward an academic career.
“More long term, I’d like to be a professor where research is part of my job,” he said.