Two Oregon State University students are winning entrepreneurship awards as part of the team developing Alerty, a mobile app to help students — especially those with ADHD — perform better in class.
Most recently, the team won the Social Entrepreneurship Award at the TiE University Global Pitch Competition and was one of 30 teams to advance to the semifinal round, out of some 1,400 accepted into the competition.
Amy Glen loves skiing, so much that it factored into her decision to attend the University of Vermont, where the Alaska native majored in biology and competed with the university’s ski team.
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree, Glen worked at a lab that conducted analytical chemistry studies for pharmaceutical companies, where she worked with a lot of Excel spreadsheets. She realized that automating the manual data entry tasks would help her become more efficient in her job, but she didn’t have any programming background.
Xiao Fu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and artificial intelligence, has received a Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, award from the National Science Foundation. Fu will use his five-year, $500,000 award to develop a suite of nonlinear factor analysis tools and contribute to a deeper understanding of unsupervised machine learning and sensing systems.
In a momentous win, 15 Oregon State University undergraduate students took the top spots in Oregon in the prestigious International Collegiate Programming Contest’s Pacific Northwest regional competition.
Shaurya Gaur, a computer science student and president of the OSU student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, helped organize the group’s participation in the contest.
“I competed last year and I loved working with others to solve these fun problems. Ever since, I’ve enjoyed competitive programming, and I wanted to keep doing it with my friends,” he said.
Yue Cao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Energy Systems research group, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award includes a grant of nearly $500,000 over five years.
Ravonne Byrd’s school and work are both in Corvallis, although her home is much closer to Albany — not the one just up the road, but that other Albany — about 3,000 miles away, in New York.
A student in the popular postbaccalaureate computer science online degree program offered through Oregon State Ecampus, Byrd also telecommutes to her job with the College of Engineering’s Center for Applied Systems and Software.
In a way, Sanjida Yeasmin is pursuing her PhD in electrical and computer engineering not just for herself, but for countless others as well.
“I’m trying to bring electronics to the medical field to save lives or make lives better. This always drives me,” she said.
Soft robots are made of pliant, supple materials, such as silicone. Some can squeeze through tiny spaces or travel over broken ground — tasks that stymie rigid robots. The field of soft robotics is still in the early stages of development, but it offers remarkable potential. One day soon, soft robots may be used in applications as diverse as searching collapsed buildings or as exosuits that facilitate recovery from injuries or strokes.
Debbie Chou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, is a researcher at heart. This is how she knew that Oregon State’s College of Engineering, where she also earned her master’s degree, was her ideal graduate milieu.
