Rhett Olson

About Me

I am a computer scientist, currently in my last year of my undergraduate degree, studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering. I am currenlty applying for Ph.D. programs to start in Fall 2025.

I work as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant in the UMN Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Research Projects

Automatically Extracting Linked Data for Place Names on Historical Maps

Historical maps contain rich information about the past, and serve as vital sources for scholars in many different fields. Through this project, I have developed a novel approach to facilitate scholarly analysis of place names on historical maps. This approach enables scholars to conduct queries for instances of a given place (e.g. "Istanbul") that retrieve dated, scanned historical maps of that place, which reveal when different names for that place were used over time (e.g. when "Istanbul", "Constantinople", and "Byzantium" were used on many different maps). Read more
Truth Learning in Social and Adversarial Settings

As a participant in the 2024 DIMACS REU Program hosted by Rutgers University, I research the problem of truth learning in social networks. Specifically we aim to characterize when it is possible for large networks to collectiely learn some truth with high probability, despite the presence of adversarial agent who try to spread misinformation. Read more

Publications

Olson, R., Kim, J., and Chiang, Y. Y. (2024). Automatic Search of Multiword Place Names on Historical Maps. In 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Searching and Mining Large Collections of Geospatial Data. Accepted, to appear.
Olson, R. M., Kim, J., & Chiang, Y. Y. (2023, November). An Automatic Approach to Finding Geographic Name Changes on Historical Maps. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (pp. 1-2).

For this paper, I won 3rd prize in the undergraduate category of the 2024 ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals.

About Me

Research Projects

Automatically Extracting Linked Data for Place Names on Historical Maps

Truth Learning in Social and Adversarial Settings

Publications

Olson, R., Kim, J., and Chiang, Y. Y. (2024). Automatic Search of Multiword Place Names on Historical Maps. In 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Searching and Mining Large Collections of Geospatial Data. Accepted, to appear.

Olson, R. M., Kim, J., & Chiang, Y. Y. (2023, November). An Automatic Approach to Finding Geographic Name Changes on Historical Maps. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (pp. 1-2).

Cirriculum Vitae

Contact Information