December 06, 2004 —
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Nels Beckman |
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Lior Elazary |
Two computer science undergraduates — Nels Beckman and Lior Elazary — have received
honorable mentions in the national Computing Research Association's (CRA) 2005
Outstanding Undergraduate Awards competition.
The Viterbi School of Engineering students were among 85 undergraduate computer
science students across the nation cited for their outstanding research potential
in an area of computing research, according to the association.
“This is the first time USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering has received two
awards in one year from CRA,” said Gérard Medioni, chairman of the Computer Science
Department. “We are very proud of these students’ accomplishments and the potential
they have demonstrated for continued success in their fields.”
Beckman, a senior majoring in computer science, worked with his faculty adviser,
Nenad Medvidovic, to create a software program for developers of distributed systems
who must identify the best deployment options for maximum performance in a software
system.
“Developers have found it challenging to determine which software components
should be located on which computers in a distributed system,” Beckman said. “My
software program allows them to explore many different options fairly easily.”
Elazary, also a senior computer science major, worked with his faculty adviser,
Michael Crowley, to design a program that enables a robotic arm and camera eye
to recognize objects and touch them.
“The robot was first able to learn how to generate a saccade movement, or rapid
eye movement, in order to center its eye on an object,” Elazary explained. “Then
it had to manipulate its arm to touch the object.
“We didn’t use any implicit programming to achieve this task, but instead, designed
a Self-Organizing Feature Map’ to have the robot learn everything on its own,”
he said. “The end result was a robotic arm that is adaptive to its environment.”
Students will be presented with their awards at a suitable research conference
yet to be determined. An announcement and list of the winners will appear in the
January 2005 issue of Computing Research News and be posted on CRA's website at
http://www.cra.org/.
Microsoft Research and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs sponsor the annual Outstanding
Undergraduate Awards Program in alternate years. Microsoft Research is sponsoring
the 2005 awards.
