Senior Design Showcases the Future of Technology
Groundbreaking projects designed by engineering students push scientific boundaries
In a hard-earned culmination of over a year of work, senior engineering students presented their innovative research, projects and prototypes at the School of Engineering’s competitive Senior Design Conference on May 11. Spanning all eight undergraduate engineering majors, the summit offered insight into future technological trends.
Across 18 separate sessions in five disciplines, students presented their projects to a decorated panel of industry professionals and faculty members. After a day of deliberation, a winner was selected from each session, with one to five winning teams from each discipline: bioengineering; civil, environmental and sustainable; computer science and engineering; electrical and computer engineering; interdisciplinary and mechanical engineering.
Bioengineering major Joy Ku and her partner Renceh Flojo placed first in the third bioengineering session. Their project is a software breakthrough that can identify specific antigens, markers that the immune system recognizes and produces antibodies to combat. The novel software finds specific spots on desired antigens that show interactions with the immune system, allowing researchers to build a better understanding of the tested viruses or toxins. These insights allow for breakthroughs that can change the way we combat illness and disease.
“[Renceh and I] were fortunate enough to file a patent application for our software design back in August, and attended two international conferences to present our work late last year as well,” Ku said. “I’ve heard that our senior design project has set the bar quite high, and I'm proud that we've been able to inspire people to get excited about their own projects.”
In the future, the applications of this project may stretch to cancer research. Ku says that further development could allow scientists to input known cancer markers and produce a targeted response to destroy the relevant cancer cells.
“My family has a history of cancer and it’s something very personal to me, so I’m beyond grateful to have the opportunity, through our senior design project, to be proactive in doing cancer-related research”
Some students have an understanding of the background behind their research. But others don’t know if their project is even possible, and some have no idea where to start. When first-place winners in the electrical and computer engineering session Pranav Grover and his partners, Edward Ghazarossian and Christian Garcia, initially planned their senior design project, they weren't completely sure what to expect.
“We had one course in our junior year to prepare for senior design and one of the activities was to watch the Senior Design Conference of the seniors at the time,” Grover said. “It was interesting to see the level of expectation for the project, but I didn’t have too much knowledge about the previous projects.”
His project, a device called Theia, uses eye-tracking sensors to control a cursor on a handheld device, using eye movement to scroll, click and interact with a screen. After spending a year and a half on the project, his team’s scope changed multiple times, going from gaming modularity to productivity before finally settling on a potential solution for people with motor disabilities who struggle with using mice and touchscreen devices.
“Part of the work was investigating whether this is a feasible technology,” Grover said. “When you have an eye tracker, the biggest issue is accuracy. The difficulty with a handheld system is that your device is moving around, your body is moving around and your whole environment is changing. The bulk of our project was improving the accuracy of the eye tracker so that it’s suitable to be used in a handheld device.”
Bioengineering majors were not the only seniors to use the human body as inspiration for their senior design projects. Electrical and computer engineering majors Cathy Yin and Rikesh Mehta worked to improve satellite image processing using neural networks. The technology is an artificial intelligence model that processes data in a way that mimics the human brain in order to automate object detection of tens of thousands of photographs.
Currently, satellite imagery can be applied to identify large-scale environmental trends and changes, such as weather patterns, population growth and migration.
“Especially in today's world, there is so much information out there that it can be difficult for a human to organize everything manually,” Yin explained. “If object detection is automated, it would be faster and cover more ground.”
Throughout their 18 months of work, Yin and Mehta faced many challenges, especially regarding modernizing the codebase. Because the project used a pre-existing neural network system, much of the code was non-functional in modern computer architecture. The process was a great deal of trial and error–the team had to feed the system thousands of satellite images and adjust it based on its performance.
“I think the best memory I have working on this project is the moment my partner and I finally got the code to run on our computer,” Yin said. “It took us weeks to figure it out, and when we did I definitely breathed a sigh of relief.”
Senior Design Conference Winners:
In the bioengineering sessions, the winning teams were: Zena Fasheh, Gavin Cormier, Misha Manushree and Rebecca McKinny; Grant Gini and Josh Chansky; and Joy Ku and Renceh Flojo.
In the civil, environmental and sustainable engineering sessions, the winning teams were: Vanessa De La Rosa, Renae Romandia McCoy, Mia Vlaming and Meghan Walsh; Wyatt Rich and Kelsi Rice; and Matthew Hale, Jake Porter and Dylan Stegman.
In the computer science and engineering sessions, the winning teams were: Ryan Le, Erik Mitchell and Mark Castillo; Lucas Voron, Graham Purvis, Josh Kelleran and Malcolm Weaver; Sudhish Sewpaul, Tate Musante, Jaden Ngo and Roshan Sevalia; Marcus Chavez, Sean Leininger and Joseph Pham Nguyen; Matt Seminatore and Peter Hay; and Lauren Xie, David Truong, Tino Theodoropoulos and Jason Vu.
In the electrical and computer engineering sessions, the winning teams were: Rikesh Mehta and Cathy Yin; Robb Chun and Anonna Hasan; Aria Rouzmehr, Logan Barnes and Michael Quang; and Pranav Grover, Edward Ghazarossian and Christian Garcia.
In the interdisciplinary sessions, the winning teams were: Julia Yaklich, Harper Daniels, Leanne James, Laini Reynolds and Courtney Rowe; and Dylan Hsu, Anugrah Murali, Julian Hermosura and Brian Burke.
In the mechanical engineering session, the winning team was: Aaron Juan, Anne Paloma, Robert Canalas, James Oblitas and Miles Nguyen.