Joshi Among Ten Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Finalists

Through 3MT, Doctoral Students Share Accessible Research

Tuesday, March 4, 2025 - by Sarah Bender

Finalist Ananya Joshi also participated in 3MT last year, and has continued to refine her presentation by balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of her thesis.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) pits doctoral students against the clock and each other to explain complex research and captivate their audience in just three minutes. Ten finalists will compete in the 2025 3MT Championship at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11, in the Cohon University Center’s McConomy Auditorium. A livestream will also be available.

Back for its tenth year at CMU, 3MT is a celebration of research that challenges Ph.D. students to present a compelling oration on their thesis and its significance in language that anyone can understand. Developed by The University of Queensland in Australia, the competition was brought to Pittsburgh by Helen and Henry Posner, Jr. Dean of Libraries Keith Webster in 2013. Since then, CMU doctoral candidates have joined students at over 900 universities across more than 85 countries worldwide in sharing their work with broad audiences through the competition.

Finalist Ananya Joshi also participated in 3MT last year, and has continued to refine her presentation by balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of her thesis. The School of Computer Science student studies AI systems that domain experts in public health use every day to monitor large volumes of public health data in the Computer Science Department.

Joshi’s research is applied right here at CMU. For the past two years, the university’s Delphi Group, which develops the theory and practice of epidemic tracking and forecasting, has used her functional monitoring system to detect data quality issues or outbreaks.

“During the pandemic, Delphi had large volumes of data, but the data users — including public health decision-makers and modelers — were overwhelmed by the volume of data,” she explained. “Because of the noisy, ever-changing, and messy nature of public health data, the theoretical limitations of existing approaches became clearer. I discovered that the core problem of ‘finding the needle in a big data haystack’ was an open one after trying various existing techniques.”

Joshi’s solution helped solve a real-world issue in the field of public health. Now, she is considering ways it might be applied across other domains with large, imperfectly monitored data streams, including agricultural pest detection or anomalous financial activity monitoring.

At the championship, CMU leadership and alumni judges will choose the first-, second- and third-place winners to receive $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. Two audience-selected winners will receive $500 for the People’s Choice Award and $750 for the Alumni Award.

Alumni can watch the competition via the livestream, where they can vote to select the Alumni Award winner.

The Three Minute Thesis Championship is free of charge and open to the public. Registration is required to attend the in-person event or to view the livestream.

Read the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries full 3MT article.