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ECE Students Win "Meeting of the Minds" Awards

 Undergraduate Research Symposium Showcases Projects

May 18, 2006

A group of 440 Carnegie Mellon students exhibited their projects at this spring's 11th annual "Meeting of the Minds" undergraduate research symposium, including more than 65 students from the ECE Department.

"Our undergraduate experience contributes to developing general leadership and decision making capabilities in students in addition to building research skills in their research area," said Indira Nair, vice provost of education at Carnegie Mellon. The symposium is organized by Carnegie Mellon's Undergraduate Research Office.

Several ECE students won awards at the event's competitions, which were sponsored by corporations, departments, honor societies, and individuals. Read on for the ECE winners. <!--(for a complete listing, visit the URO site)-->

Sixth Annual Lockheed Martin ECE Undergraduate Project Award

Organized by Carnegie Mellon's chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, the ECE National Honor Society, this competition encourages undergraduates in ECE to present their projects and motivates them to learn from others' work.

  • First Place:
    • Daniel Weller and Rahul Mangharam
      "GrooveSim Vehicular Network Simulator"
      Advisor: Daniel Stancil
  • Second Place:
    • Kermin Fleming
      "SPIRAL: Hardware Transform Extension"
      Advisor: James Hoe
  • Third Place:
    • Bowei Gai, Arti Thumar, Samir Shah, Jay Patel, and Liyana Mohd Sharipp
      "EAST - Hardware Speech Recognition"
      Advisor: Rob Rutenbar
  • Judge's Choice:
    • Naju Mancheril
      "Multiprocessor Query Dispatching in QPIPE"
      Advisor: Anastassia Ailamaki
    • Joseph Trapasso
      "Multiplierless Hardware Implementation for Digital Signal Processing"
      Advisors: Markus Pueschel and James Hoe
    • Ehud Halberstam
      "A Low-Cost Victim Detection Sensor Module for Urban Search and Rescue Robots"
      Advisor: John Dolan

Ford Motor Company Undergraduate Research Award

This award encourages environmental and automotive research. Entries may cover a range of disciplines, such as environmental policy issues, vehicle emissions modeling, automotive business modeling, or electrical system development with applications in automobiles. The judges are Carnegie Mellon alumni that are employed by Ford.

  • First place:
    • Matt Wasserman (MechE) and Theodore Trebaol (ECE)
      "Design of a Power Limiter System and Vehicle-to-Driver Information Relay System for a Formula SAE Vehicle"
      Advisor: John Wiss
  • Third place:
    • William Burkey, Nicholas Selman, Laura Rose Semo Scharfman (all MechE), and David Kang (ECE)
      "Rapid High-Quality 3D Surface Generation for Formula SAE Application"
      Advisor: John Wiss

Fifth Annual Bose Competition

This competition is open to all students with research projects related to audio: technology, signal processing, or education. This year, one of the judges was an ECE alumnus: David Breece, III, (B.S. 2002) is an electrical engineer in Bose's Automotive Systems Division.

  • First place:
  • Second place:
    • Joseph Trapasso
      "Multiplierless Hardware Implementation for Digital Signal Processing"
      Advisors: Markus Pueschel and James Hoe

Sigma Xi Poster Competition

This independently sponsored competition is open to students presenting posters in the quantitative sciences. Grants were provided by a number of industrial sponsors. Sigma Xi is a national honor society for those in scientific research.

  • Honorable Mention:
    • Rahul Mangharam and Daniel Weller
      "GrooveSim Vehicular Network Simulator"
      Advisor: Daniel Stancil
    • Ehud Halberstam
      "A Low-Cost Victim Detection Sensor Module for Urban Search and Rescue Robots"
      Advisor: John Dolan

CIT Honors Poster Competition

All students conducting research through the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) Honors Program participate in this competition, judged by industry representatives and faculty from across CIT, including the following ECE faculty: Shawn Blanton, James Hoe, Radu Marculescu, Asim Smailagic, and Tom Sullivan.

  • First place:
    • Ramamurthy Bhagavatula
      "Application of Kalman Filtering to Active Face Tracking"
      Advisor: Marios Savvides
  • Third place:
    • Daniel Weller
      "GrooveSim Vehicular Network Simulator"
      Advisor: Daniel Stancil

Statistics Department Competition

The purpose of this competition is to encourage undergraduate projects and research in statistics and its applications, to inform faculty and students about these projects, and to encourage cross-departmental interaction.

  • First Place:
    • Olga Beschastnykh (Economics), Wilson Chai (ECE), John Havran (Math), and Stephanie Kuga (Statistics)
      "Share Prices and the Oil Industry: Modeling Financial Times Series"
      Advisor: Alessandro Rinaldo
  • Second Place:
    • Nick Segalla (Business), Jessica McGillen (Statistics), Margaret Cartaya (History), and James Kerchenfaut (ECE)
      "Detecting Sources in Astronomical X-Ray Images"
      Advisors: Rhiannon Weaver and Alessandro Rinaldo

View the photo gallery.

Ning Sung Lee, a senior in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction, presents her research on gender recognition using parts-based feature classification at the undergraduate research symposium.

From left to right: ECE students Jorge Meza and Manuel Gonzalez-Rivero and MechE student Akshay Jayaram display work on the navigation of autonomous mobile robots.

ECE student Han Chun Lim shows his distributed aggregate management sensor network to Janet Peters, Assistant for Undergraduate Education in ECE.

Rozana Hussin, an ECE student, explains her work on strained silicon transistors to onlookers.