Two Standout Three Minute Thesis Competition Participants Share their Research

by Margaret Savoie

The Graduate School is fortunate to have students who are academically and research driven. This past semester, 65 students presented their research at the first round of the Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT®). Of these 65 students, 21 advanced to the final round. Among these finalists were two PhD students, Thomas Cilloni from Computer Science and Engineering and Thamsanqa Jongile from Nutrition and Hospitality Management.

Cilloni Cilloni, originally from Genoa, Italy studied at the University of Liverpool from 2017 to 2020 before coming to the University of Mississippi. While at the University of Liverpool, Cilloni was part of a Double Degree program with Xi’an Jiaotong University through the international joint venture university Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, studying information and communication science and software engineering.

For his 3MT presentation, Cilloni presented on facial recognition and artificial intelligence.

“Facial recognition tools are becoming exceptionally accurate in identifying people from images,” explained Cilloni. “However, this comes at the cost of privacy for users of online services with photo management, such as social media platforms.” He continued, “Particularly troubling is the ability to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to recognize faces even when a user does not actively label its own images; we therefore propose Ulixes, a strategy to generate visually imperceptible changes to facial images that make it impossible for AI to recognize who you are.”

Cilloni’s interests in this area of research were sparked back in 2018 when one day Instagram servers blacked out images and would not load on his feed. Cilloni was only able to read backup descriptions of the images that had been posted.

The images were sometimes mislabeled. Cilloni said “I find this extremely scary and a major violation of privacy. I then set out to protect users and after 2 years of research I was able to build Ulixes.”

Looking to another area of research is Thamsanqa Jongile, who is pursuing a doctorate degree in Nutrition and Hospitality Management.

Jongile Jongile, originally from the Netherlands, studied at Stenden South Africa, an International Branch Campus of NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, obtaining a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Hospitality Management in 2015. Prior to that he attended City and Guilds of London Institute and earned an advanced diploma in International Tourism. He had experience in working in USA, including at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans before coming to the University of Mississippi.

“My dissertation weaves together the organizational behavior, hospitality management, and gerontology perspectives to explore the impact of psycho-social factors on successful aging in the workplace,” said Jongile.

He continued, “More specifically, I contend that emotional regulation, narcissistic leadership, and human resource policy coverage with employee resilience, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction … influence employee functionality and longevity in hospitality profession; I locate my work as part of the groundbreaking research on the successful aging concept in the hospitality industry.”

Jongile was interested in this area of research after a mixture of experiences as an employee in the hospitality environment and his mentor’s interests on the gerontology perspective.

Jongile is pursuing a future in academia and human resource consultancy and Cilloni’s hope for the future is to contribute to making privacy-preserving software part of the services that are used every day.

These two 3MT presentations illustrate the range of works and studies pursued by the many PhD students from different graduate programs. The Graduate School was proud to showcase these educational endeavors and looks forward to seeing what the future holds for them and all our future graduates.

Two Standout Three Minute Thesis Competition Participants Share their Research

Newsletter Fall/Winter 2021 Articles