From Backyard Ziplines to Self-Driving Cars: UCLA Computer Science Student Develops Tools to Help Autonomous Vehicles Safely Share Information

But it wasn’t until middle school, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that she started working on her own projects and taking computer science courses on the online learning platform Coursera.

“Everybody has something that feels like magic to them, something that lets them do what shouldn’t be possible, and that’s what computer science is for me,” she said.

Research on Making Self-Driving Cars Safer Now a rising second-year computer science student at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, Markova conducts research at the UCLA Mobility Lab, which is directed by Jiaqi Ma, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and computer science at UCLA Samueli.

Markova is also a reinforcement learning fellow with AI Safety at UCLA, a student research club for creating safe and robust AI systems.

For Markova, projects like Bruin Bet also reinforce what first drew her to building things: the satisfaction of turning an idea into something real.