Isabella Luo

Isabella Luo is from Dallas, Texas and graduated from The Hockaday School. Fascinated by the intersection between economic infrastructure, robotics, and computer vision algorithms, she intends to pursue a degree in Computer Science at Columbia with a minor in Sustainable Engineering and Economics.

In 2024, Isabella joined Dr. Qin Yang and Dr. Kirill Morozov at the University of North Texas, where she researched autonomous vehicle cybersecurity. Alongside the team, she developed a research proposal focused on utilizing F1Tenth cars, miniature vehicle models that are a tenth the size of a normal F1 car, to model how autonomous vehicles could be vulnerable to outside attacks. To simulate a normal environment for the cars, Isabella independently coded both fixed path and sensor perception based algorithms in C++ for the cars in a model city. Further she assisted with planning cyber-attacks onto the cars to test their external security measures.

In her second project with Dr. Qin Yang the following year, Isabella dived deeper into cooperative autonomous vehicles, working to help better transfer information between two self-driving cars. While current cooperative autonomous driving software only shares camera captured images between cars, her research focused on creating a fusion framework that integrates agent data in between each driving module to ultimately improve and optimize path planning. Her work on query-level fusion between an ego and sender vehicle involved multiple synchronization methods and machine learning algorithms. Isabella’s investigation into the vehicles combined loss feedback training and simulation testing against the NuScenes benchmark of the CARLA dataset.

Outside of research, Isabella is actively involved within her community. She is the co-captain and engineering notebook lead of her robotics team, leading them to multiple accolades on the national level. As Editor-in-Chief of her school literary magazine, Isabella utilizes her graphic design skills to shine light on emerging artists within her community, earning awards both individually and as a publication in design competitions. She also founded FinovateHack, a community initiative to bring exposure to careers in technical and business fields while spreading access to financial literacy.

In her free time, Isabella enjoys curling up with a good book, revisiting her ever growing diamond painting collection, and pretending to be a food blogger while discovering new restaurants. At Columbia, Isabella hopes to continue pursuing research, with the end goal of building autonomous initiatives that position themselves as human-forward with community-driven impact.