UConn’s College of Engineering held their 11th annual poster competition in the Student Union Ballroom last Friday. Graduate students from all types of engineering disciplines showed up and showcased their research, ranging from sleep and parking to a robot nautilus.
Students had three minutes to present their research to the judges, and an additional two minutes to answer follow-up questions. There were two rounds of judging, the first one decided a winner from each department who received a $50 cash prize.
The second round has each department winner compete against each other for the top three overall, and a cash prize of $1000 for the overall winner. People could also scan a QR code to nominate a poster as the “people’s choice.”
One of the grad students presenting a poster was Alexander White, a Graduate student in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Manufacturing Engineering.
White helped create a robot nautilus to explore underwater jet propulsion. According to White, the idea for this project came from wanting to explore new environments where they can collect motion data using actuators — machines that can convert energy into physical motion.
While actuators couldn’t be used in water, White’s research team instead used a soft actuator. In particular, they used a dielectric elastomer actuator, where an elastomer layer is sandwiched between two layers of compliant electrodes. When a voltage is run through the electrodes, the elastomer undergoes “axial depression” according to White, where the layer flattens and spreads out.
White’s team wanted to use this device to measure siphon jet propulsion underwater, as there wasn’t a lot of research on the topic. To achieve this, White helped design a system consisting of a siphon, nozzle and actuator, along with untethered electronics, cased in a nautilus-inspired body. He looks forward to further building on this platform and said there is space for improvement with this robot.
Prakash Ranjan is studying for his PhD in Transport Engineering. Ranjan’s project looked into a driver’s decision-making process when finding parking.
First his team sought to find out what factors influenced where one wants to park. Is it based on socioeconomic reasons? Or is it location-based?
To find out, they created a traffic simulation where agents would try to find parking. Ranjan concluded that “garage fees and space available were the two key attributes in a driver’s decision-making process.”
Using this information, Ranjan and his peers created new scenarios where the garage fees and space available were altered. These two attributes would also change throughout the day during simulations, so the garage fee could hike during peak hours and fall during off hours.
Ranjan also plotted the average garage occupancy over a day to see how the space available in a parking lot changes over time. He concluded that parking garages are mostly 50%-70% filled throughout the day and that fee variations during peak hours don’t influence drivers too much, as they probably care more about parking close to their destination than finding cheap parking.
Camila Jiménez-Wong, a PhD student in the Biomedical Engineering department, had done a pilot study on sleep quality — “which is a big issue in the U.S. now, or at least since forever.”
Jiménez-Wong went over many factors that could affect sleep, like work, location and mental health. Her pilot study consisted of one night of monitoring, where patients’ brain waves were monitored via Electroencephalography (EEG) channels. Patients would also answer a quick questionnaire afterwards.
Jiménez-Wong monitored only one night of sleep to remove any subjectivity and personal judgement that arises from studies that monitor sleep quality for months at a time. Once she received her data from the EEG channels, she fed them into machine learning algorithms who helped her find over 100 features that could affect sleep quality, based on brain waves. Of the 100 features recorded, she found that only two of them were linked with good sleep quality, both coming from the same EEG channel.
Students, professors and judges mingled, looking at each other’s posters for two hours, after which the judges left to deliberate the first round of winners.
The judges came out and named their departmental winners, who got pictures with their certificates and Dean of Engineering JC Zhao. Congratulations to Nidhi Sharma, the Biomedical Engineering department winner, Deniz Ipekci for Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, John Toribio for Material Science & Engineering, Sajan Shakya for Civil Engineering, Israt Jahan for Environmental Engineering, Aayushi Verma for the School of Computing, Soroush Vahedi for Electrical & Computer Engineering and Sahib Sandhu for the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Manufacturing Engineering. Electrical & Computer Engineering student Alaa Selim also garnered an honorable mention.
Soon afterwards, the judges named their overall top three of the event. Congratulations to Toribio, Sandhu and Ipekci, who finished in the top three respectively. If you want to learn more about the event, head to @uconnengrgrad on Instagram.