While many seniors spend their time researching in the library and writing extensive honors papers, Engineering students are often involved in quite a different studying experience. Each of the School of Engineering and Applied Science departments, from Bioengineering to Electrical Engineering, provides students with the opportunity to produce a senior design project and take part in a hands-on production experience.
This past week, the Electrical Engineering Department hosted its senior design awards. Yet before this ceremony could be held, students engaged in many different forms of training to produce their projects.
"The Electrical Engineering senior design project runs two semesters in the senior year. The students are expected to finish the project as they would if they worked in the industry," said Siddharth Deliwala, a senior design project adviser and Electrical Engineering professor.
He added that during this process, "students are encouraged to work in a team and enhance their communication skills while they pursue their project goals."
This year's senior design projects proved to be quite interesting, according to program directors, making it difficult to award the top three prizes ranging from $50 to $100. Winning selections were chosen for their clarity and complexity, according to organizers.
This year's first-place winners included Engineering seniors Adam Mihalik and Jeff Katencik for their project entitled "Sleep Apnea Detection and Scoring Neural Network." What makes this project so applicable is that sleep apnea -- the temporary cessation of breathing while sleeping -- is as common as diabetes in American society.
According to an abstract, Mihalik and Katencik's project "aims to determine the viability of sleep apnea detection with use of neural networks. ... Sleep doctors will be able to more efficiently diagnose sleep apnea [and] ... sleep clinics will become less costly."
Engineering seniors Sameer Qudsi, Ramu Pratiwadi and Sandip Saha came in second place for their project entitled "Aquanet-Low Power Water Analysis Network."
These three seniors' project addressed oil spills. While oil spills may not typically be as large as the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, small spills often occur from offshore oil platforms. Therefore, they developed Aquanet, which "provides a reliable, cost-effective approach to detecting and providing valuable data including the thickness of an oil spill in a real-time environment," according to a project abstract.
Lastly, in third place was a project entitled "Virtual Reality Glove," created by Engineering seniors Yao Hua Ooi and Bryan Chao. According to a project description, the virtual reality glove is "a hand-worn apparatus that measures hand motions ... [including] finger bending, movement of the hand in 3D space and hand rotation."
The movements recorded by this glove will then be applied to the Sony AIBO robotic dogs, which are the robots that comprise Penn's award-winning robotic dog soccer team.
In addition to these three prizes, two other distinguished honors were awarded. First was the $150 prize for the Harold Berger Award, which is given to the student whose design project best combines conceptual and technical innovation. Engineering seniors Ralph Pfeifer and Gopi Unnithan received this award for their "On-line Laboratory Notebook."
According to Pfeifer and Unnithan, this virtual notebook will simplify the lab process because "with a notebook stored digitally, student[s] no longer need to use pen and paper to record lab data, and the process of taping external information [into a written notebook] is no longer needed."
The most prestigious award given to students is a $300 prize called the Frederick Ketterer Memorial Award, given to one or more seniors for extraordinary technical achievement in their senior design project. The award this year was given to Engineering seniors Sith Chaisurote and Toon Tantimekabut for their project entitled "Speech-Based Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications."
The Speech-Based CPDLC is expected to revolutionize air-traffic control communication by creating a speech recognizer satellite system as opposed to the original text-based system, which according to project creators, can only "recognize messages correctly with 95 percent accuracy. The message should [be] ... sent through the network without error."
