It has been about a month since the start of the Fall 2020 semester. Faculty and students all had expectations for this semester, whether it be the first or last or somewhere in between. Here in the graphic information technology program, those expectations are nothing short of being met. The program is already taught entirely online and on campus classes often have an iCourse offering, so this isn’t completely grey water.
The Society of Women Engineers has recognized Elizabeth Jones of Arizona State University for her impact on the Society as well as the engineering community with the SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member Award.
On August 30
, Arizona State University’s award-winning robotics submarine team, Desert WAVE, competed and won second place overall in the 23rd International RoboSub Competition.
In lieu of an in-person competition, teams were evaluated on a video, website and technical design report. Desert WAVE had top finishes in all of these categories.
Thirty-three teams representing Brazil, Canada, Egypt, India, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Singapore and the United States participated in this year’s competition.
Learn more about Desert WAVE. Read about their journey to the 2020 virtual competition and their notable 2019 competition results.
Lidija Buchanan, a chemical engineering student, won first place in the Changemaker Challenge with her Engineering Projects In Community Service, or EPICS, project. The team, of which she is currently the sole member, aims to ease one of Phoenix’s food deserts by making fresh produce more accessible. The win earns the project $10,000 for further development and implementation in the community.
Projects and internships set computer science students apart from one another when applying for jobs. They provide real-world development experience to complement theory-based courses.
As the COVID-19 pandemic interrupts the plans of many computer science students and graduates to build skills through internships, two Arizona State University alumni have a solution: Quaranteam.
Dhantin Kumar and Kaan Aksoy, who both graduated in May with computer science degrees from the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, were inspired to help their peers who lost summer internships to take advantage of personal projects as an alternative to further develop their skills.
Matthew Aguayo (left) and Aashay Arora pose atop the Agribusiness Center building at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic campus. Aguayo and Arora founded EnKoat, a startup venture developing coating materials that reduce energy consumption by insulating buildings outside heat or cold. Photographer: Connor McKee/ASU
EnKoat, an advanced materials venture founded by ASU alumni Aashay Arora and Matthew Aguayo, recently won a $225,000 National Science Foundation Phase I Small Business Innovation Research award, a highly selective seed funding program known as SBIR.
The award supports the further development of EnKoat’s energy-efficient building coatings. The venture’s energy-saving technology embedded in paint, plaster and stucco can save up to 30% on heating and cooling costs. The coatings can be applied to interior or exterior walls or roofs of new buildings, or as retrofits to existing structures.
Earning a Phase I SBIR award will allow EnKoat to demonstrate its coating technology’s feasibility and performance, bringing it closer to commercialization.
This year, EnKoat has earned a number of awards, including selection into the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator and the Joules Accelerator, and a runner-up award in the 2020 EarthX climate-tech prize competition.
As doctoral students, Arora and Aguayo worked with Narayanan Neithalath, a professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering, to develop a concrete pavement with phase change materials that is resistant to cracking when exposed to high temperatures. Phase change materials turn from solid to liquid and vice versa to store or release heat. This led Arora and Aguayo to explore how phase change materials could keep buildings cool, which resulted in their venture EnKoat.
Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar
Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar, a computer science doctoral student in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, is one of three ASU graduate students to have been awarded prestigious 2020 Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Awards by the American Astronomical Society. Santosh Harish, and Mansi Padave from ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration are the other two.
Chambliss medals recognize exemplary research by students who present at one of the poster sessions at the meetings of the AAS. Only six awards were granted nationwide to graduate students. The award is named after Carlson R. Chambliss of Kutztown University, who donated the funds to support the prize.
Nayyar is a member of the Autonomous Agents and Intelligent Robots research group. Her research focuses on key artificial intelligence principles to help build efficient systems that can reason, plan and act under uncertainty. In collaboration with co-adviser professors Sanchayeeta Borthakur and Siddharth Srivastava, she studies probabilistic approaches to automate physics-based detection and identification of intergalactic clouds.
“My experience at the American Astronomical Society meeting has opened my eyes to the immense potential of interdisciplinary collaborative research,” said Nayyar. “I believe in, and remind myself every day, that satisfaction in research comes with a struggle for discovery. I hope my work now, and in the near future, will help in advancing our understanding of the universe and its evolution.”
Nayyar’s achievement is particularly exciting because she won this award as a computer science student and presented her AI research on using first-order probabilistic logic for reliably inferring properties of intergalactic space far beyond our own galaxy.
“Not only did she succeed in explaining her work to an entirely different academic community, but she did it so well that she won an award for it! She’s helping build bridges across research communities in true ASU style,” said Srivastava.
“I joined ASU as a master’s student and got so fascinated by the study of artificial intelligence that I decided to pursue doctoral studies instead,” says Nayyar. “I hope that my work would someday motivate others enough to help them bring out the researchers within themselves.”
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Congratulations to two Fulton Schools alumni out of The Polytechnic School — Jake Slatnick, technological entrepreneurship and management, and Eric Goodchild, electrical and embedded software engineering — who negotiated a $500,000, three-Shark deal on the October 14, 2019, episode of Shark Tank.
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Sri Hari Jayakumar (left), Sheran Dass (second from left) and Akshay Kumar Dileep (right) pose with Amazon judges at Sunhacks 2019. Their team won the “Best Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Implementation on AWS” award from Amazon. Photo courtesy of Akshay Kumar Dileep
Sri Hari Jayakumar, Sheran Dass and Akshay Kumar Dileep, three Fulton Schools graduate students and friends from Chennai, India, took inspiration from their own college application experience to win an award in their first U.S. hackathon competition — Sunhacks 2019, hosted at ASU in September.
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The Fulton Schools Maroon team competes in the 2019 ASU Academic Bowl. Photo courtesy of Melissa Stine
Fulton Schools students put their heads together and earned second place in the 2019 Arizona State University Academic Bowl. The Maroon team students — Kai Yin, a computer science junior; Geoffrey Wong, a computer science senior; Kyle Xue, a double-major biomedical engineering and computer science junior; Jack Fleitman, a computer science senior; Colton Sowers, a computer science senior; and Brian Kozik, a computer science junior and captain of the team — will split $10,000 in scholarship money.
In classic College Bowl style, the ASU Academic Bowl pits teams of four against each other in lightning-fast question and answer rounds for trivia in political science, pop culture and everything in between. Top teams earn scholarship money and bragging rights.
