National Science Foundation Fellowships

Three CS&E students received the prestigious NSF Graduate Research fellowship Awards for the coming year: graduate students Andrew Drenner and Natalie Linnell and undergraduate Kristen Stubbs. Two students received Honorable Mentions: graduate student Monica LaPoint and undergraduate Colin McMillen.

Andrew Drenner & Natalie Linnell

Andrew Drenner of Waterloo, Iowa, is a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa. His advisor is Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos. Currently Andrew is interested in issues involving multi-robot cooperation for exploration of unknown areas and maintaining sensor coverage once an area has been explored. Specifically, he is interested in constructing teams of heterogeneous robots for applications in the detection and neutralization of hazardous biological or chemical agents.

Natalie Linnell, a graduate of the CS&E Department from St. Cloud, Minnesota, works with Gopalan Nadathur in the area of programming languages. Currently she is working on modifying the unification system in Teyjus, Professor Nadathur.s implementation of Lambda Prolog. However, she wrote her grant proposal about adapting implementation techniques from Teyjus to an implementation of another declarative language, Twelf.


Monica LaPoint

Monica LaPoint, a graduate of Chicago State University from Shoreview, Minnesota, has returned to graduate school after a career as a software engineer. She is currently interested in robotic vision applied to locomotion and manipulation, focusing on tracking and depth perception. Her advisor is Richard Voyles.




Kristen Stubbs and Colin McMillen

Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Finalists

Kristen Stubbs and Colin McMillen were each finalists in this competition which has separate awards for female and male students. Though they didn.t win the top award or runner-up, they were in the top six in their groups, quite an accomplishment. The work they did that qualified them to be fiinalists was with the Scout Robot project under Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos.

Kristen helped to improve the software architecture used with the Scouts and to design and build the software architecture for the new, larger MegaScouts. She has also worked with Professor Papanikolopoulos on his transportation project where she worked to integrate data from multiple cameras monitoring an intersection. This work should result in better estimates of the actual positions of the cars and pedestrians in the intersection.

Colin implemented a resource scheduler that allows the Scouts. software architecture to efficiently allocate hardware and software resources. He also was primarily responsible for the installation and configuration of an embedded version of the Linux operating system that is used on the MegaScouts and for helping implement a C++ interface to many of the hardware devices present on the MegaScout. More recently he has worked with Professor Papanikolopoulos on a project which uses video cameras to track vehicles at a traffic intersection. The eventual goal of this project is to be able to warn drivers of potential collisions. Kristen, who is from Lee.s Summit, Missouri, will be enrolling in the Ph.D. program at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall where she plans to investigate human-robot interaction utilizing principles from anthropology, psychology, and computer science.

Colin, who is from New Hope, Minnesota, will be entering the Computer Science Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University. He is interested in working with artificial intelligence, especially as applied to multiagent and multirobot systems.


Matt Rasmussen

Matthew Rasmussen Wins Goldwater Scholarship

For the second year in a row, a CS&E undergraduate has won the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship. Congress established the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program in 1986 to honor Senator Barry M. Goldwater and to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue careers in these fields.

Matt, who is from Eden Prairie, Minnesota, participated in the Army High Performance Computing Research Center Summer Institute last summer. He has also worked with Professor George Karypis developing a GUI for his clustering toolkit library. See www.cs.umn.edu/~cluto. Matt.s GUI is called gCLUTO (Graphical Clustering Toolkit). Matt plans to attend graduate school in bioinformatics after completing his undergraduate degree at the University.

-Bobbie Othmer