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(L) Adam Wilkerson - (R) Scott Clouse

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is pleased to announce that Adam Wilkerson and Scott Clouse, two students pursuing their PhD's in Electrical Engineering, are the recipients of Department of Defense SMART Scholarships.

The Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship for Service Program has been established by the Department of Defense (DoD) to support undergraduate and graduate students pursuing degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The program aims to increase the number of civilian scientists and engineers working at DoD laboratories.

Adam Wilkerson is pursuing his PhD in Electrical Engineering at NCSU after completing his Master's in pure mathematics from Indiana University, where his focus was on Algebraic Topology.

While finishing his PhD over the next two years, he will be working on analyzing social networks using techniques in algebraic topology beyond graph theory. These techniques are a combination of ideas derived from the social science and network community and ideas developed in the study of sensor network deployments over the last 15 years. The idea is that pairwise relationships in a social network don't determine all the social structure within that group, and that higher-dimensional  data will shed some light on these holes in our understanding of human interactions.

After that, he'll be working in Huntsville, AL, studying sensor network deployments and continuing his social networks research.

Hamilton Scott Clouse is pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at NCSU with an emphasis on pattern recognition. In the field of remote sensing, measurements are made from a distance with sensors of various modalities. Scott's work centers on the combination of phenomenological understanding and signal/image processing techniques to extract high-level descriptions of scenes observed in this manner. These data are of great dimensionality and, under the direction of Dr. Hamid Krim, Scott focuses specifically on geometric analysis techniques for such high-dimensional data.

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Kathan Bender tinkers with a bamboo water fountain created by his team for Freshman Engineering Design Day.

The bubble-blowing machine created by Morgan Danyi and her team worked just fine except for one minor problem: It didn't blow any bubbles.

Some parts spun too fast. The unstable platform wobbled. The bubble solution carried by spinning wands spilled before reaching the bubble-blowing fan. No solution, no bubbles.

Something had to be done. In two weeks, Danyi and her team planned to enter the machine into NC State's 13th Annual Freshman Engineering Design Day.

"Being an engineer is all about trial and error," Danyi, a freshman in chemical engineering, said after some last-minute tweaks made the machine competition-ready. "You identify the problem, brainstorm a way to resolve it and then create the finished product."

Freshman Engineering Design Day brings together more than 1,300 students on more than 400 teams who have completed design projects assigned in the College's introductory engineering course. Students huddle in groups for several weeks before the event, assembling hovercrafts, stitching together fabric buckets, molding concrete canoes, engineering nuclear reactor probes and tinkering with chain-reaction-driven Rube Goldberg machines.

All that work culminates in a day-long competition held in two packed rooms of students, faculty, judges and parents at NC State's McKimmon Center on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Medals are awarded to the winners.

 
Morgan Danyi (in yellow) and her Design Day team overcame technical hurdles to create a working bubble-blowing machine.

"Design Day is the defining first-semester experience for engineering students," said Brian Koehler, the director of international engagement for the College who helps run the event. "It's a great opportunity for our first-year engineers to tackle difficult engineering problems they'll be facing during the next four years and ultimately in their professional careers."

Each project comes with its own set of constraints. Students must not exceed a $40 spending limit, which encourages creativity and innovation by forcing them to reuse, borrow and find creative resources in places other than store shelves.

That spirit of frugality and reusability was on display at this year's event, where students used toy cars, old plastic containers, aluminum foil, scrap wood, oil funnels, rubber bands, Pez dispensers, Tupperware containers and duct tape to build their entries.

Personalization is encouraged. A plastic watering can and holiday lights topped a flower-rimmed fountain. Arcade pinballs pummeled miniature Duke and UNC mascots. 18-inch concrete canoes - they can hold 10 pounds of marbles if built properly - were proudly painted NC State red.

For Danyi, the event turned out to be more than just a first-semester highlight. It gave her the chance to be a team leader and employ problem-solving skills when things didn't go as planned.

After the bubble-blowing failure, the team regrouped and devised a new design. A battery-powered motor in an overturned toy truck spun a wheel that had been cut from the bottom of a five-gallon plastic bucket. Because the wheel was larger and heavier than the CD covers they had originally used, the spinning wands that cradled the bubble solution became much more rigid, allowing the machine to spit out bubbles by the dozens.

The relieved team had its entry.

"The experiences at Design Day are a very accurate taste of what engineers will have to deal with in the real world," Danyi said.

Kathan Bender, a freshman majoring in civil engineering and environmental engineering, said the event improved his team's time management skills and taught team members the value of advance planning.

The group entered the water fountain competition, in which students must create a device that propels water upward against gravity. Bender and his team decided to meet early in the semester to begin work.

 
Students ready their projectile launcher for the competition.

The group built its waterfall from bamboo stalks. The stalks were tied together with twine and then set into a bamboo box filled with water and small stones. The water, propelled by an electric pump, was able to flow through a plastic tube encased in the central bamboo stalk, emerging out of the top and flowing back down into the box.

"After choosing the water fountain as our project, we had to decide on a theme and what parts of the project we wanted to assign to each person," Bender said. "Then we started planning the layout, gathering materials and putting it all together. It helped me learn the necessity of getting everything drawn out in advance before you start working."

Although Bender's team didn't receive a medal, he believes the group's bamboo water fountain was a crowd-pleaser that "gained the popular vote" of visitors to their table. Danyi's team didn't medal either, but that didn't take away from the event's positive experiences.

"Figuring out how to put our strengths together and working through problems are going to be very valuable experiences for the future," Danyi said. "Teamwork and effective communication are highly important for any group of people working together on a project."

The skills learned through Design Day help prepare Danyi, Bender and hundreds of other students for the more challenging projects to come in their academic and professional careers.

"Design Day helps our first-year engineers continue developing their interdisciplinary teamwork, problem-solving and communication skills while creating something that works," Koehler said. "With these skills, students can become leaders who solve challenging problems."

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All without leaving her living room.

Born with a chronic heart disorder that weakened her immune system and made attending school risky, Lexie, 9, was tutored at her home in Sumter for years. But this spring, her family began experimenting with an alternative — a camera-and-Internet-enabled robot that swivels around the classroom and streams two-way video between her school and house.

“She immediately loved the robot,” her mother, Cristi Kinder, said, of the device, called a VGo, which Lexie controls from her home computer. Lexie dressed up the robot, which is about the height of her third-grade classmates, in pink ribbons and a tutu, and she renamed it Princess VGo.

A small but quickly growing number of chronically ill students — at least 50 across the country — now attend school virtually with what are called “remote presence robots.” The technology is still expensive (a VGo costs $6,000, in addition to $1,200 a year for maintenance and other costs) and imperfect (when the robot loses its Internet connection, it goes lifeless and must be pushed).

And despite the fantasies of Lexie’s classmates — “I want a robot so I can stay in bed all day,” one 8-year-old said — such robots are mostly last resorts for children restricted to their houses or hospital rooms.

As Web-based video becomes more prominent as a teaching tool, special education advocates say these robots are valuable alternatives to tutoring. About 23,000 students across the country are homebound or hospitalized each school year. They might not otherwise interact with classmates or could fall farther behind academically, advocates say.

“Soon, these robots should be the price of an inexpensive laptop,” said Maja Mataric, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California, who studies how robots help children with learning disabilities. “They should make access to education much easier for students who are convalescing.”

Dr. Mataric’s research focuses on using robots to teach social cues to children with autism. Children adapt far more quickly to the technology than adults and treat the machine like another classmate, she says. During a fire drill at one Texas school, students were so worried about the VGo that they insisted on escorting it out of the building to safety.

The VGo is four feet tall, weighs 18 pounds and is shaped like a white chess pawn, with a video screen on its face. Lexie controls its movement with her computer mouse. Video of the classroom at Alice Drive Elementary School appears on her computer screen, and video of her face appears on the robot’s display screen. The robot and Lexie’s computer support two-way voice communication, and Lexie can flash her VGo’s lights to get the teacher’s attention.

Since 2007, VGo, based in Nashua, N.H., has been selling the robots to company executives who want to keep an eye on employees while traveling and to doctors, who use it to “visit” patients at different hospitals. Two years ago, it realized schools might be a new market. The first classroom model was sold to a school in Knox City, Tex., to be used by a child with an immune deficiency.

The company’s big break came during this year’s Super Bowl. Verizon, which provides the LTE wireless connection for the robot, ran a commercial about a student using VGo. Before the ad, VGo had sold about 10 robots to schools. Since then, they have sold about 40.

Most robots are bought with state or local money marked for disabled students, but at some schools, parents have held fund-raising events or bought the robot themselves. In Huntsville, Tex., education officials bought five VGos last year and are planning for five more next year. They named the program Morgan’s Angels after a student with cancer who missed school for six months but was able to attend remotely with the robot’s help.

For students like Connor Flanagan, 14, of Tyngsborough, Mass., the main benefit has been social interaction. He does not go to school because of a rare lung condition, but he has stayed in touch with friends while awaiting a transplant.

“He walks down the hallway kind of like everybody else,” said his mother, Jennifer Flanagan. “The kids — aside the fact that it was a robot — they treated him like Connor. He’d roll through the room, and you’d hear ‘Hey, Connor. Hi, Connor.’ ”

Parents have raised privacy concerns about children using cameras in class. But Ned Semonite, the company’s vice president for marketing and product management, said it was no different from a smartphone or Web camera.

The greatest logistical challenge is maintaining an Internet connection. Lori Gearhart, of Colesburg, Iowa, said her grandson, Aidan Bailey, 9, was able to use the robot after his lung collapsed last year. His science class was studying insects, and Aidan kept a cocoon in his hospital room. He would show classmates videos of its transformation into a butterfly.

But other times, she said, the robot, which was bought through a community fund-raising effort for Aidan, could not receive enough of a wireless signal. “It ends up where the classmates have to carry the robot down the hall,” she said.

In Sumter, Shawn Hagerty, the director of special education programs for the school district, bought a robot after seeing Verizon’s commercial. The teachers set aside a day when students could meet and play with the robot.

Lexie’s robot has its own desk and charging station against a wall. Ivey Smith, her teacher, said the children had embraced the idea of having a robot in the class and screamed with excitement every time it turned on.

“I was concerned they would be distracted,” she said. “But within a couple days, they acted like it had always been here. They feel special that there’s a robot in their class.”

On a recent day, Ms. Smith’s class was learning about synonyms. She asked every student to think of a word with the same meaning as the word “glassy.” A moment later, the robot’s pink and green lights blinked, and the class shouted, “Lexie!”

“My word is ‘shiny,’ ” she said through the video screen.

“Yes, very good,” the teacher replied. “Good answer.”

Between classes, Lexie guides the robot down the hallway. At day’s end, she rolls it to a charging station. On the way out of class, one child, Hazel Grace Kolb, waved goodbye to the machine.

“See you tomorrow, robot,” she said.

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