2013-14 Undergraduate Student Awards

Students, parents, and faculty gathered on Friday, March 14, 2014 to celebrate the achievements of EECS students who earned a special award for academic achievement, research, service, or entrepreneurial activities. Khalil Najafi, Chair for Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Marios Papaefthymiou, Chair for Computer Science and Engineering, presented the awards.

College of Engineering Awards

Epeians Emerging Leader Award
This award is presented to a second year undergraduate student who has made valuable contributions to the College of Engineering community, demonstrating initiative by taking leadership roles within at least one student organization and showing promise as a future leader in the College of Engineering.

     Lauren Bilbo, Electrical Engineering

Distinguished Academic Achievement Award
This award is presented by the College of Engineering to an outstanding student from each program offered within the College of Engineering. Students are selected by each department on the basis of academic and personal excellence.

     William Liu,Computer Science
     Paul Myers, Electrical Engineering
Scott Su, Computer Engineering

Distinguished Leadership Award
This award is presented to undergraduate and graduate students of the College of Engineering who have demonstrated outstanding leadership and service to the College, University, and community.

     Jill Bender, Computer Science
     Isabel Maria Bonachera Martin, Electrical Engineering

EECS Awards

Outstanding Achievement Award
This award is presented by the EECS Department to an outstanding senior student from each of the three programs of study (EE, CE, and CS) in EECS. Students are selected on the basis of outstanding overall academic and personal excellence.

     Philip Bunge, Computer Engineering
     Paul Myers, Electrical Engineering 
     Carolyn Vlach, Computer Science

Outstanding Research Award
This award is given to students who completed an outstanding research project with a faculty member or graduate student over and above the requirements of a course or an independent project.

     Noah Klugman, Computer Engineering
     Benjamin Mehne, Computer Science
     Kwesi Rutledge, Electrical Engineering

Outstanding Service Award 
This award is presented to students who have shown exceptional leadership in their student organizations, service to the University, College, or Department, or service to the community.

     Amit Kalay, Computer Science
Shannon Liu, Electrical Engineering
Aditi Rajagopal, Computer Engineering

William L. Everitt Student Award of Excellence
This award is presented by the EECS Department to a top student from each of the three programs of study (EE, CE, and CS). These students are in the top 10% of their class and have an interest in communications and computers, as well as professional interests and activities.

     Aaron Crasner, Electrical Engineering
     Mark Isaacson, Computer Science
     Benjamin Wang, Computer Engineering

William Harvey Seeley Prize
This award is presented to an electrical engineering student who stands first in his/her class at the completion of the freshman year.

     Gideon Billings, Electrical Engineering

Commercialization/Entrepreneurship 
This award is presented to one or more students who exemplify a partnership between engineering and business through involvement in or startup of a private business, patents, or partnerships with corporations, furthering their field of knowledge or interest.

     Jamie Sookprasong, Computer Science
     Scott Su, Computer Engineering

EECS Scholars
This award is given to EECS seniors who have been in the College of Engineering at least two full semesters and have a cumulative 3.9 GPA or greater as of Fall 2013.

SURE Awards
These awards provided funding for students to work with faculty members on research projects of mutual interest. Following is a list of projects and participants.

Accelerating Those Yet-To-Be Born Chips
Student: Yu (Karen) Xing
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Valeria Bertacco

Airway Object Tracking
Students: Hobey Khun and Jaleel Salhi
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Honglak Lee

Anomaly Detection in Large Sets of Climate Data
Student: Joe Hidakatsu
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Clayton Scott

Autonomous Robotics Research in the APRIL Lab
Student: Danyang Wang
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Edwin Olson

Control-Data Isolation
Students: Benjamin Mehne and Clayton Wheeler
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Todd Austin

Convolutional Neural Networks for Vehicle Detection
Student: Ruben Villegas
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Honglak Lee

Design and Fabrication of IR Absorbers
Student: Klevis Merko
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Mina Rais-Zadeh

Developing a Space Experiment to Investigate the Use of Miniature Electrodynamic Tethers to Enhance Capabilities of Ultra-small Spacecraft
Student: Nathan Sawicki
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Brian Gilchrist

Evaluation and Development of Wireless Receiver
Student: Xuexiu Han
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Michael Flynn

Fast Modeling of the Static and Dynamic Characteristics of a Switching Semiconductor
Student: Nomar Gonzalez-Santini
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Juan Rivas

Identification of Emotional Invariance Across Music and Speech
Student: Benjamin Burke
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Emily Mower Provost & Georg Essl

Invisibility Cloaking 101
Student: Dike Zhou
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Anthony Grbic

Latency Arbitrage and Market Fragmentation
Student: Dylan Hurd
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Michael Wellman

Mobile Apps in the K-12 Classroom
Student: Jiexi (Cici) Lu
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Elliot Soloway

Near-Ground Wave Propagation Measurements With Miniaturized Antennas at Low VHF Band
Student: Komlan Payne
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Kamal Sarabandi

Non-programmatic Layouting on iPhones and iPads
Student: Taylor Cronk
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Georg Essl

Optimizing Transparent Thin Film Transistors
Student: Bradley Frost
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Becky Peterson

Post Silicon Bug Localization
Students: Wade Bonkowski and Astin Teferi
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Valeria Bertacco

Shout, MANES, and Distributed Networking
Students: Nathaniel Jones and Jonathan Tiao
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Robert Dick

Solving Hard Problems by Solving Harder Problems Halfway
Student: Xinyu (Gwin) Zhou
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Igor Markov

Twitter Predictor – Daily Update and Webpage
Student: Bochun Zhang
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Michael Cafarella

Using GPUs to Accelerate X-ray CT Image Reconstruction
Student: Shamik Ganguly
Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Jeff Fessler