Each year, Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering asks our students engaged in summer research to tell us about themselves, their work and the goals of the research they are working with professors on. This year, the questionnaire was completed by intrepid scientists, mathematicians, engineers and tech experts on campus at Loyola Marymount University — and beyond the bluff!
Lauren Campbell ’26, a computer science student whose research was overseen by professor Mandy Korpusik, continued their work on In2Eat, an app that assists users with intuitive eating.
Can you describe your research for those outside your field of study?
I’m currently working on In2Eat, which is an app that focuses on intuitive eating instead of the traditional calorie counting model for diet tracking. The app allows users to log their meals as if they were speaking to another person, and that input goes through natural language processing for us to identify what exactly you ate, and provide the calculated nutrient information for a given meal. Currently, I’m working on building a cross-platform version of the app in React Native, improving the UI/UX design, and adding some new features to the app!
What do you think readers will find most interesting about your project?
In2Eat is an app that anyone could use, and one that I think many people would benefit from. It focuses on diet quality by highlighting consumption in terms of a user’s recommended daily intake of macro and micronutrients, instead of tracking calories or weight loss. I think that this focus allows users to be cognizant of the food they’re eating in terms of eating the right foods to fuel their body, instead of micromanaging what you eat based on a low calorie count that may have minimal nutritional value.
In your experience, how does doing research complement coursework?
One of my favorite things about doing research is being able to see the practical applications of a lot of what we learn throughout the semester in the projects, and also being able to bring new skills and knowledge to the table as I’ve taken more classes. Especially in the CS department, many of our classes are project-based and provide introductions to new technology and methods of approaching problems, and research provides a great platform to further explore topics introduced in those classes.