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If Oghap Kim ’26 didn’t fully appreciate having a research paper accepted at a prestigious international conference, she certainly did when it came time to present it last summer.

Kim represented Professor Ashwin Lall, chair of the computer science department, and two fellow Denison students, Lam Do ’26 and Chloe Chai ’25, on stage at the 37th International Conference on Scalable Scientific Data Management at Ohio State University.

The Denison entry was one of just 12 accepted by the committee in the Long Research Paper category and the only one presented by an undergraduate. While Kim admitted to feeling a bit intimidated by the surroundings, she delivered a flawless 13-minute presentation.

“All the other presenters were either faculty members or PhD students,” Lall said. “Oghap presented our paper in front of an audience of PhDs and did an awesome job.”

Don’t take the professor’s word for it. The judges honored Denison’s work with the Best Paper award at a conference that brings together domain experts, data management researchers, practitioners, and developers from around the world.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Kim, a computer science major who plans to attend graduate school. “I was almost crying on the way home.”

Being the paper’s only author present for the June 25, 2025, award ceremony, she shared the remarkable news with Lall, Do, and Chai through a group email. Back home in Vietnam, Do received the message in the wee hours of the morning.

“We did this research as part of the Summer Scholars program in 2024,” said Do, a computer science major who plans to become a software engineer. “It was a great experience, and I have become a more confident person because of it. Professor Lall makes us feel like we are the experts in the field of our research. I never thought it was possible our work would be compared to PhD students and faculty members.”

The 10-week summer research was an extension of Lall’s work in the field of the indistinguishability query — a concept in databases where a system returns results that are so similar to the optimal results that a user can’t tell the difference. It helps solve the “fear of missing out” factor by offering near-optimal choices without needing a perfect utility function.

The group’s paper is titled, “The Power of Two: Simplified User Interaction for the Indistinguishability Query.”

The research could lead to more efficient online shopping. It’s designed to help consumers save time and make the best decisions when searching the internet for important purchases.

Key highlights of the paper are:

• Introducing a simplified user interaction framework for multi-criteria decision-making.
• Providing a “tolerably truthful” algorithm for executing the indistinguishability query.
• Illustrating performance evaluations for algorithms on real and artificial data sets, and including results from a small user study of 30 Denison students administered by Kim in the fall of 2024.

Most people are familiar with the time-consuming process of clicking through endless website pages, looking for the right product. Denison researchers propose asking consumers a series of questions to determine what factors are most important in their purchasing decisions. The program weeds through databases to offer head-to-head comparisons.

The judges rewarded the Denison researchers for an approach that was “novel and interesting.”

Kim is the second member of her family to attend Denison. Her older sister, Hyangyoo Kim ’25, is a data analyst in New York.

She’s happy with her choice of schools, and for the opportunity to work closely with members of the computer science faculty.

“I am grateful for Denison,” she said. “I have friends who went to larger schools, and I hear about their experiences. I don’t think many undergraduates at those schools get these kinds of chances. I’m working on something that helps people solve problems and meet their needs. This experience has been very rewarding.”