On April 24, more than 100 guests crowded into Ballroom B & C of the Mason Inn to view 39 undergraduate research posters. The posters covered diverse topics—from tracking robots to tuning pianos.
Judges from the school's corporate partners program each spent several hours evaluating as many as 15 posters each.
"The array of talents and topics was impressive. It was exciting to see so many students working with faculty mentors to find innovative solutions to real-world problems," said Michael Troutman from Harris IT Services, Cyber Solutions Group, one of the five volunteer judges from industry.
While votes were tallied, two groups of students served as keynote speakers and presented their research to the audience. The first group of Michael Bowen and David Fleming described their research with "Flockbots: Small, Open-Platform Robots for Swarm-Style Multi-Agent Research." The second presentation, presented by Lakshmi Meyyappan, Sara Bondi, Fritz Reese, and Jacob Morgan, described the process of creating a unique and cost effective tool to automatically tune upright pianos.
When Associate Dean Sharon Caraballo announced the winners, the "PowerTune" group not only earned the People's Choice Award, but also wowed the judges and earned a second award for Outstanding Project.
Other Outstanding Project winners and their presentations were:
Luca Estinto - The Feasibility of Active Audio Crossovers for 2-way Mini-Loudspeakers
David Remer - Time-Frequency Spectral Analysis of Inpatient Non-Epileptic Continuous EEGs Correlation with Continuous Intracranial Pressure
Jean Rouly - Parallel Hierarchical Affinity Propagation with MapReduce
Eric Cawi - Modeling Lost Person Behavior with Historical Data
Mohamed Lahlou - Ultrasound Imaging to Control Trans-Radial Prosthesis
Minh Van - Conformational Sampling and Principal Component Analysis of the Met-Enkephalin Peptide
The top award winners are all eligible to present their posters at the university-wide Celebration of Student Scholarship on May 6 at the Center for the Arts.