How an enterprising student and his professor combined to advance AI research

The first visit from Son Tran ’24 to the office of professor Matt Kretchmar was unremarkable. The second was revelatory — a two-hour conversation that put a precocious pupil and willing professor on a course to scholarly adventure.

Kretchmar has taught computer science and mathematics at Denison since 1999. He’s lost count of how many students like Tran, brimming with enthusiasm and great intentions, have expressed interest in researching the field of artificial intelligence.

“It’s hard — it’s a deep discipline,” Kretchmar said. “It usually takes several years to get enough experience to do something meaningful.”

Not for Tran, who approached Kretchmar within his first few weeks on campus about doing work in the areas of machine learning and large language models.

The professor met briefly with the computer science major, encouraging him to write a research proposal, never expecting to see him within three days, a nine-page paper in hand. The authority in which it was written, and the comprehension of a complex subject, belied the student’s age.

Kretchmar and Tran talked at length, the student offering his analysis on research material he brought to the professor’s office. It was like listening to a young Mozart dissect musical composition.

Tran was just a sophomore — he spent his first year in his native Vietnam learning remotely because of the global pandemic — and had only developed an interest in AI in 2019.

“I could see instantly he understood this stuff at a very high level,” Kretchmar recalled. “He started showing me the coding projects he was working on, and it was, ‘Wow, this is not the usual smart student. This is the super smart Denison student.’”

The partnership formed that day has produced multiple scholarly works, including one accepted by the prestigious European Association of Computational Linguistics.

It’s rare for an undergraduate to co-author papers in AI scholarship, and nearly unprecedented to see the student emerge as the driving force in research. But it underscores the value of studying at a small liberal arts college and the willingness of Denison professors to give students the one-on-one attention necessary to achieve lofty goals.

“Matt is my adviser, my supervisor, my collaborator, and also the one who’s supported me unconditionally,” Tran said. “He’s the one who always believed in me.”