June 2016 Five10 Report

Civil Engineering seniors Martina Sbicca, Marie McNamara, and Andrew Porter won Best Overall Design in the 2016 National Timber Bridge Design Competition! Their 14-foot long truss bridge had a deflection of only 7.5mm when tested with a 4,500 pound load. And they won Most Aesthetic Design and Best Deck categories!

Reece Jackson ’18 (computer engineering major, entrepreneurship minor), CTO, and Christian Raroque (Vanderbilt University) won the Center for Innovation’s Business Plan Pitch $5,000 Grand Prize. Their technology development and consulting company, AloaLabs, strives to eliminate the risk associated with product development.

Eric Stackpole '15 (M.S. Mechanical Engineering), co-founder of OpenROV and creator of the OpenROV submarine, an open source, low cost underwater robot, was interviewed by YouTube channel, Tested, at last month’s Maker Faire. Check out his interview about OpenROV's new Trident Underwater Drone. 

Maker Challenge Winners: Congratulations Cody Berdinis '17, Andrew Torrance '19, Stephen Pacwa '19, Rory Pannkuk '19, Adi Bhati '19, Victor Figueroa (graduate student), and Asa Jacob '19. Their Bronco phone stand will be a give-away at the Big Bash in October. More on Facebook.

Senior Design Conference: Thank you to the 100+ alumni, industry leaders and friends of the School of Engineering who served as judges at last month's Senior Design Conference, where more than 80 teams of engineering seniors presented their capstone projects. See a list of session winners here.

Two NASA Satellites Being Controlled: Students, staff and faculty in the Robotic Systems Laboratory are conducting mission operations for NASA Nodes spacecraft, ejected into space from the International Space Station May 16.  Experiments involving communication crosslinks between the two satellites are ongoing.  Updates regarding the mission may be found here.

Chris Kitts, director of the Robotics Systems Laboratory, was an invited presenter and participant in a Department of Homeland Security symposium, May 17-18.  The symposium involved the use of UAVs for homeland security and border patrol operations, concentrating on sensing architectures, advanced drone platforms, and user interface/autonomy challenges.

Alka Jarvis (computer engineering) received the “Colleague of Distinction” award from United States Technical Assistance Group to ISO/TC176 for her contributions in the development and release of the ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Standard, the most used management standard in the world with over 1.4 million users.

Shanxi Li (Lanzhou University, China) joined Nam Ling's (computer engineering) research group as a Visiting Scholar beginning April 18 for one year, and works in the area of video coding.

Mahmud Rahman (electrical engineering) presented a series of invited lectures on “Photovoltaic Devices and Solar Technology” and “Microprocessor Fabrication Technology” to students on three campuses of Morelia, Leon, and Queretaro of Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico, one of the most prestigious and largest Universities in Latin America.

Nayana Dawalbhakta '00 (MS computer engineering), Master Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprises, presented on the deployment, orchestration, and administration of networks and overlay connectivity of L2 and L3 networks at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, TX, Apr. 25-29. Watch her presentation here.

Allison Kopf '11, SCU Solar Decathlete and co-founder of Agrilyst, an indoor agriculture analytics service, announced the company has raised a $1 million seed round. The round was led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures with participation from Metamorphic Ventures and a number of angel investors and seed funds. More information.

Two School of Engineering alumnae were selected as Silicon Valley Business Journal's 2016 Women of Influence. Aruna Ravichandran '98, MBA '09 (M.S. computer engineering is vice president, product and solutions marketing at CA Technologies. Carol Reiley '04 (computer engineering) is a roboticist and co-founder of Drive.ai.

State of the School: What is the distribution of students within the different engineering disciplines?  How do we promote an entrepreneurial mindset within our Broncos? What’s happening in our labs? Find out in the 2016 State of the School Address.

Tiny House Update: Construction begins June 20 and many of the materials have been ordered. A dry-flush toilet arrived last week, the raspberry pi computer for the control system is here and being coded, and the saltwater batteries are being built. For the latest developments, Follow us on Facebook.