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Founder Background

Computer Science & Materials Engineering

Stephen Price Headshot

Stephen Price

Founder & Lead Researcher

NSF Graduate Research Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate in CS • WPI (GPA 4.0/4.0)

LinkedIn Email

Background & Research Focus

National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow & Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science with a focus in AI/ML. Accomplished researcher in applied computer vision and natural language processing across academic and corporate environments.

An 11x published author (8x first-author), including a first-author paper at CVPR 2026, and co-author of research presented at the 2022 Nobel Symposium. Awarded Best Student Research at TMS 2024, Best Graduate Student Project by ASM International (2024), and recognized as an Honorable Mention by the Computing Research Association (CRA) for Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers in North America.

His doctoral dissertation research at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) focuses on promptable segmentation for scientific and materials imaging under Dr. Elke Rundensteiner and Dr. Danielle L. Cote. He previously served as a Data Scientist and Generative AI Research Intern at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT).

Scientific Imaging PromptMoE, SAM refinement, instance segmentation, and SEM powder morphology.
Unstructured Data & LLMs Structured literature extraction, program-aided language models, and bias/nondeterminism evaluation.
Process Optimization Wire-Arc DED bead shape prediction and cold spray processing datasets.

Publications

Selected Peer-Reviewed Research

CVPR 2026 Highlight Paper Reviewer Score: 6/5/5
PromptMoE: A Segmentation Refinement Framework Leveraging Mixture of Experts for Improved Prompting
S. Price, D. L. Cote & E. A. Rundensteiner. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026.
Cold Spray Benchmark 2026 ArXiv:2605.04257
HUGO-CS: A Hybrid-Labeled, Uncertainty-Aware, General-Purpose Dataset for Cold Spray
S. Price, K. Miller, M. Musto, K. Kroelein, J. Saal, K. Tsaknopoulos, E. A. Rundensteiner, & D. L. Cote. ArXiv, 2026.
TMLR 2025
Mastering SAM Prompts: A Large-Scale Empirical Study in Segmentation Refinement for Scientific Imaging
S. Price, D. L. Cote & E. A. Rundensteiner. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025.
Scientific Reports 2025
DualSight: Multi-Stage Instance Segmentation Framework for Improved Precision
S. Price, K. Judd, K. Tsaknopoulos, R. Neamtu, & D. L. Cote. Nature Scientific Reports, 2025.
ICPRAM 2025
Document Analysis with LLMs: Assessing Performance, Bias, and Nondeterminism in Decision Making
S. Price & D. L. Cote. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, 2025.
IMMI 2021
Automated and Refined Application of CNN Modeling to Metallic Powder Particle Satellite Detection
S. Price, M. Gleason, B. Sousa, D. L. Cote, R. Neamtu. Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation, 2021.

Awards

Fellowships & Honors

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) Recipient National Science Foundation (2024)

National fellowship recognizing outstanding research potential in computing.

CSAT 2026 Student Poster Competition — First Place Cold Spray Action Team (2026)

People's Choice Award Winner for physics-informed synthetic data generation for cold spray.

ASM & TMS Graduate Presentation Awards — First Place ASM & TMS International (2024)

Best Graduate Student Project (ASM) and Best Student Research (TMS 2024).

WPI Salisbury Prize & Summa Cum Laude Graduate Worcester Polytechnic Institute (2023)

Awarded to the top graduating computer science student with a 4.0 GPA.

CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher — Honorable Mention Computing Research Association (2023)

Recognizing undergraduate research excellence in computer science across North America.