Texas A&M Engineering News

Students work around the clock to design a more inclusive campus during the 2018 Diversity Hackathon

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 CST

With only 24 hours on the clock, students came together to design and develop ideas to help make the Texas A&M University campus more inclusive.

The 2018 Diversity Hackathon brought students from many disciplines at Texas A&M to the Langford Architecture Center on Feb. 2-3, where they worked overnight to help turn spaces on campus into more welcoming environments for all people.

Cecilia Giusti, associate dean for outreach and diversity in the College of Architecture and head of the Diversity Council, launched the Diversity Hackathon four years ago. The inaugural hackathon featured a partnership with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the College of Engineering continues to play an important role in the event with a majority of the participants being engineering students.

“For 24 hours they talk about what it means to be diverse, what is an inclusive approach, and how to talk better about inclusion and diversity,” Giusti said. “[And] they actually create or produce something. Even if they don’t win anything, the whole exercise is fantastic—it’s magic.”

One team of general engineering freshmen worked to develop a tool to help the visually impaired better navigate campus. Team members prototyped a device that could slip onto the back of a pair of glasses and connect to a phone, which could then use the campus Wi-Fi to pinpoint the wearer’s location. The device would then communicate information through vibrations against the bone in the back of the ear.

“It would notify you of different obstacles around campus and different buildings or streets so that a person who was visually impaired would be aware of their surroundings and know which way to go without needing to look at a map,” said Jaxon Tucker.

There were six challenges teams could choose from provided by different programs across campus. The College of Engineering asked students to focus on the Zachry Engineering Education Complex and how to make it more accessible for students with hearing, visual or physical impairments.

“It’s going to be a world-class, state-of-the-art building, and I was hoping that students might come up with some concepts to ensure that all of our students are welcome and can participate at the same level,” said Debra Dandridge, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station and engineering accessibility coordinator.

To help with the creation process, students had access to several resources, including 3-D printers and other tools provided by the College of Architecture. One team took up the challenge to create an open space for communication by developing an interactive screen to help people share concerns and ideas in a more accessible way.

“We’re going to have an interface for people to share their ideas through texts,” said junior computer science engineering student Muin Momin. “We have a phone number set up and people can text complaints or something they like about the space that they’re in, and that will display as a word cloud on the screen so everyone can see what’s going on and the owners of that space can get ideas on how to improve it.”

Being a part of the hackathon may also help students after graduation. Dr. J. Michael Moore, an instructional assistant professor in the computer science and engineering department, said industry is showing more interest in accessibility and expects graduates to be prepared to create these universally designed, accessible products.

“This hackathon is a fantastic opportunity for our students in engineering to not only try and do inventive ideas in a short period of time but also to be creative and innovative, and be ready and thinking that way, before they go out in industry,” Moore said.

Texas A&M Engineering and Alamo Colleges District co-enrollment program to begin offering classes fall 2018

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 CST

Texas A&M University, Chevron and Alamo Colleges District will enroll the first cohort of students for the Texas A&M-Chevron Engineering Academy at Alamo Colleges District in fall 2018. This innovative co-enrollment partnership was developed to address the state’s growing need for engineers. Qualified students will be admitted to the Texas A&M College of Engineering, complete the first two years of coursework at an Alamo Colleges District college and finish their engineering degrees in College Station, Texas. The program will begin accepting student applications March 1.

The Texas A&M-Chevron Engineering Academy at Alamo Colleges District allows students to remain close to home for their first two years while pursuing one of 19 majors within the College of Engineering at Texas A&M. This program is generously supported by Chevron.

“We are pleased to offer students in the Alamo Colleges District a unique pathway toward a first-rate degree from an engineering college ranked among the top 10 in the world,” said Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp. “Our goal is to attract the very best students to Texas A&M Engineering, even if circumstances require them to stay close to home for the first two years of college. These students will be Aggies in San Antonio from day one.”

“We are always eager to offer our students new opportunities for continuing their education once they graduate from one of the colleges of the Alamo Colleges District,” said Alamo Colleges District Chancellor Dr. Bruce Leslie. “Our latest partnership with Texas A&M University and Chevron will offer our students a pathway to a bachelor’s degree in a field with excellent job growth and high salaries, benefiting not only the students, but the state’s economy as well,” he added.

In Texas, the projected need for engineers in the workforce is 53,000 by 2024. To meet this need, universities and two-year colleges will need to work together to bridge the gap and attract and retain students who are interested in STEM fields. Engineering students in the Engineering Academy program enroll in math, science and core curriculum courses through Alamo Colleges District and have the unique opportunity to enroll in Texas A&M engineering courses taught by Texas A&M faculty at Northeast Lakeview College, part of Alamo Colleges District.

“Northeast Lakeview College is proud to be home for this program,” said Dr. Veronica Garcia, Northeast Lakeview College president. “This new program will help address the need for more programming in high-demand STEM fields and provide an opportunity for more students, in San Antonio and surrounding areas, to pursue engineering coursework.”

Chevron has donated $5 million to support Texas A&M-Chevron Engineering Academies across the state at Austin Community College; Houston Community College, Spring Branch in Houston; Texas Southmost College in Brownsville; El Centro and Richland Colleges in Dallas; and Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio.

“Chevron is committed to increasing access to, and the quality of, education around the world. We are proud to partner with Texas A&M on this important initiative to help ensure an educated and skilled workforce,” said Shariq Yosufzai, Chevron vice president of ombuds, diversity and inclusion and university and association relations.

“Our longstanding relationship with Texas A&M, through support of the Engineering Academy initiative, will help provide opportunities in the field of engineering for many underrepresented and first-generation college students,” Yosufzai said. “Partnering with Texas A&M, a top source of engineering hires for Chevron, to help provide opportunities in the field of engineering will support our efforts to help build the diverse workforce of tomorrow that will be required to meet the energy needs of the future."

Texas A&M Engineering Vice Chancellor and Dean Dr. M. Katherine Banks said the academies have the potential to reach beyond the typical pathways for access to a top-ranked engineering program.

“The academies, through our partnership with Chevron and the two-year colleges, provide new pathways to a first-rate engineering education,” Banks said. “Through this co-enrollment program, students can live at home for the first two years of college without postponing their participation in an engineering program that is highly regarded by employers across the country.”

For more information about how to apply and other details, visit /academies or email engineeringacademies@tamu.edu.

Tammira Philippe to serve on Aggie Boss Talk panel

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

The upcoming Aggie Boss Talk is considered an incredible opportunity for students to learn from a panel of highly successful Texas A&M University graduates and discover ways to find success after graduation. CEOs and executives from an array of industries have been invited to this event.

Former student of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Tammira Philippe ‘95, a chief financial analysis will be participating in the panel. She is president and director of Bridgeway Capital Management, Inc., and is a member of the firm’s Portfolio Review and Risk Committee. She began her career at Bridgeway in 2005. As president, Philippe’s responsibilities include development and execution of the firm’s strategy, oversight of all operations, and contributing to the marketing and client service efforts. Prior to becoming president, Philippe led strategy and operations projects at Bridgeway from 2005 to 2010, and was head of marketing and client service from 2010 to 2016.

Philippe earned a Master of Business Administration from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M. Her experience prior to Bridgeway includes strategy consulting with McKinsey & Company and business development and marketing for a global satellite communications startup. She is passionate about promoting education and social justice, and volunteers with organizations focused on those missions. Philippe serves on the Texas A&M Department of Computer Science and Engineering Advisory Council. She previously served as a board member for the Education Foundation of Harris County and as a member of the advisory board of the Terry Foundation, a scholarship provider that supported Philippe’s education.

The upcoming Aggie Boss Talk will be held Feb. 1 in Rudder Auditorium.

Student design projects recognized through Virtual Project Showcase

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 00:00:00 CST

Texas A&M University continues to highlight student project work accomplishments through the inaugural Virtual Project Showcase this fall, with the showcase winners recently being announced.

The Virtual Project Showcase provided engineering undergraduate students a platform to share their innovative projects with industry members nationwide. Industry professionals were invited to participate and judge remotely, which Magda Lagoudas, executive director of Industry and Nonprofit Partnerships and instructional associate professor, said gave them an opportunity to see the exciting projects students are involved with and the quality of work they can deliver to sponsors. Industries sponsoring a student project gained great value while supporting the university’s goals to develop the engineers of tomorrow.

“We opened this up to noncapstone students too, because it’s so important for all engineering students to be able to showcase their projects and ideas. By making a video presentation, they’re also gaining valuable experience pitching innovative solutions—something that will help them when they leave Texas A&M and enter the workforce or become entrepreneurs,” Lagoudas said.

Undergraduate students submitted a two to four-minute video describing their project and were encouraged to include images of prototypes or engineering analysis as support materials. In total, 85 teams representing more than 300 students from across the college submitted videos. A majority of the entries represented senior capstone design projects, while the remaining represented noncapstone projects such as AggiE-Challenge, design competitions and other projects.

Winning teams in the capstone category were:

1. MEEN 402 Pressure Vessel Design Project from the Department of Mechanical Engineering

2. Halliburton Heat Treatment from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

3. Mixed Reality Guitar Learning System from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering

4. ST Genetics Automated Tube Decanter from the mechanical engineering department

5. 3-D - Printed Antenna from the industrial and systems engineering department

Christian Alejandro, member of the first-place team, said the Pressure Vessel Project was a stimulating and challenging endeavor. The project’s goal was to improve and present a pressure vessel design after a previous pressure vessel had failed after 30 years of use.

“We had the unique opportunity to have our senior design project make a difference on campus and help a fellow department, the geology department,” Alejandro said. “Originally we thought we would have to do the regular showcase but then were told to create and submit a video instead. This would allow the project to be shown multiple times to different people.”

Alejandro said while explaining a two-semester project in under five minutes was a challenge, the team took away valuable lessons from the experience.

“We believe that continuing this type of showcase could be beneficial to both the university and its students,” Alejandro said.

The top three videos in the noncapstone category were:

1. Women in Engineering’s Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (WE AUV) for design competition

2.Sandcrete from the AggiE-Challenge

3. Superhydrophobic Sponges Loaded with Functional GQDs for Oil-water Separation Applications from the AggiE-Challenge

The WE AUV team built a vehicle from scratch that could compete at the annual Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International RoboSub challenge in California, where AUVs must navigate a rigorous obstacle course. Team member Abishalini Sivaraman said the showcase provided the team an opportunity to explain what they had learned and perfect their video making and editing skills for competition.

Along with constructing the vehicle, the team also aimed to “prepare women engineers to solve problems in industry and to further the field of underwater autonomy.”

"The showcase has given us the platform to reach out to many students about the existence of the team," Sivaraman said.

Women in Engineering director, Shawna Fletcher, said the WE AUV team was established in the fall of 2015 to offer opportunities for women to participate in technical challenges.

“In partnership with the (Engineering Innovation Center), these students have worked on this project outside of the classroom on their own time,” she said. “It’s terrific to see how these students are dedicated and enthusiastic about technical projects—they are on their way to becoming accomplished engineers.”

About 60 judges representing 28 industries participated in the judging. Each video was judged by three different judges who were assigned to videos randomly. Teams were judged on their ability to define the problem, discuss their design methodology, present and support technical project outcomes, and their overall video presentation.

The top videos in the senior capstone and noncapstone categories received a monetary prize.

Decoding tuberculosis: Using analysis to better understand disease, develop new treatments

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 CST

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the causative agent of the serious lung disease, tuberculosis, that is widespread throughout the world. About one-third of the human population is infected with tuberculosis, which takes at least six months of daily drug treatment to cure. Unfortunately, there is an increasing prevalence of drug resistant strains of the disease.

Dr. Thomas Ioerger, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, is working on a highly impactful, interdisciplinary project to better understand the biology and genetic makeup of Mtb. His research has the potential to prevent a significant amount of deaths per year from TB, and by analyzing the genetic makeup of TB, Ioerger and this research community is one step closer to managing this threatening disease.

He is working to uncover the interaction with the host, for example the avoidance of immune defenses during infection, to develop new and more effective drugs to fight against the disease. A key technological advance over the last decade has been using high-throughput DNA sequencing as part of these evaluation protocols, which is a way to sequence and analyze large DNA sequences, or genomes.

Texas A&M is home to several DNA sequencers, which are operated by the Genomics and Bioinformatics Center at the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. The Genomics and Bioinformatics Center is directed by Dr. Charlie Johnson, who is also executive director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Genomics Systems Engineering, a joint AgriLife and Texas A&M Engineering Experiment (TEES) Center.

Ioerger is the principal investigator for the Bioinformatics and Data Dissemination Core for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program project called FLUTE, which stands for Functionalizing Lists of Unknown Tuberculosis Entities. He is collaborating with research scientists at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Medical School and Weill Cornell Medical College.

Ioerger's colleagues in FLUTE use genetic techniques, such as making mutants of a laboratory strain of Mtb with specific genes knocked-out, and then running experiments to try to evaluate the effect of the knock-out on growth in various conditions. His collaborators send DNA samples from various experiments, the samples are prepared in the lab of his local collaborator, Dr. James C. Sacchettini in the Texas A&M Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and then they are sequenced. Ioerger's group focuses on the analysis of this genomic data and algorithms for inferring the functions of the target proteins.

Nearly half of the protein coding genes of TB have functions that are unknown. One of the main sequencing methods FLUTE relies on is a method called transposon sequencing (Tn-Seq), or the sequencing of transposon mutant libraries. A transposon is a DNA sequence that can remove its own gene and change its position within a chromosome. Tn-Seq uses transposons to insert these into random locations in the genome.

Mutant libraries contain a collection of mutants in which a large number of the genes have been disrupted – a different one in each mutant. These mutant libraries have been a great resource for investigators to understand the various biological functions of individual genes, including those involved in metabolism, antibiotic susceptibility and pathogenesis, the development of the disease.

By sequencing these Tn insertion libraries, profiles of the areas of the genome that receive transposons insertions are obtained. The premise of Tn-Seq is that essential areas of the genome cannot tolerate being disrupted by a transposon.

Tn-Seq has become widely used in microbiology labs around the world for studying the functions of proteins in many different bacterial organisms. It was largely developed in the laboratories of Ioerger’s collaborators, Dr. Eric J. Rubin, professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and Dr. Christopher M. Sassetti, professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Both are involved in FLUTE and have published many joint papers with Ioerger.

Ioerger and his colleagues are developing computational tools for the statistical analysis of Tn-Seq data. Propelled by the desire for a statistically rigorous way to tell which genes are essential based on Tn-Seq data, Ioerger and his former doctoral student and current postdoctoral researcher, Michael DeJesus, initially developed a Bayesian statistical inference method that utilizes the Extreme Value Distribution to assess the significance of gaps in the genome, or regions that did not receive transposon insertions. They have also developed statistical algorithms for comparative analysis of Tn-Seq datasets and identification of genetic interactions.

Several years ago, Ioerger and his students packaged these algorithms together in a software called Transit, which is now distributed to the public and is used by many labs around the world for Tn-Seq analysis. More recently, they have used these tools to identify proteins involved in pathways like cell-wall biosynthesis, cholesterol metabolism, trehalose biosynthesis, biotin biosynthesis and iron acquisition.

Ioerger also has funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which philanthropically supports research on TB. Through the Gates Foundation, Ioerger's group uses DNA sequencing to help identify the protein targets of inhibitory compounds from high-throughput screens, which is part of large drug-discovery pipeline involving many universities and industry partners (pharmaceutical companies).

While this work has more applied goals of developing new drugs, it builds on all the basic science learned about the physiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, including knowledge of the functions of genes and essentiality in different conditions through Tn-Seq and other methods.

Rajanna excels in Three Minute Thesis competition

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 CST

Vijay Rajanna, a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University recently participated in and received several awards for his presentation during the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition held on campus in November.

Rajanna received the first place and People’s Choice Award in the doctoral category; he was also selected as the Texas A&M representative at the 3MT regional competition to be held in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in February 2018 at the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools.

During the competition, graduate students have three minutes to present their thesis and its significance. This challenges students to consolidate their ideas and research discoveries to present concisely to an audience with no prior expertise. At Texas A&M, 3MT provides a high-impact learning experience for graduate students and is part of the Graduate and Resource Development (G.R.A.D.) for Aggies program.

At the competition, Rajanna presented the primary contributions of his doctoral research, which focuses on developing eye movement-based, multi-modal interactions for working on computers. These interactions are crucial in two scenarios – situational impairments, and impairments and disabilities by birth or due to an injury. He explained that in these two scenarios, a user wants to be able to perform at least a few basic operations conveniently on a computer.

“In this regard, we have developed a gaze and foot-based interaction framework to achieve accurate ‘point and click’ interactions on a computer,” Rajanna said. “Using this system, the user points the cursor at the desired target – a button – with their eye movements, and selects it by pressing a tiny sensor that is placed inside the shoe of the user. If the user does not have control over the foot, other methods like focusing on the target for 200 milliseconds or eye gestures can be used. With practice, users can point and click much faster than they do with the mouse. In addition, the same framework along with an enhanced virtual keyboard allows the user to enter text on a computer.”

Rajanna said that the 3MT competition is challenging, but is also highly rewarding. He currently works in the Sketch Recognition Lab under director Dr. Tracy Hammond, who is a professor in the department.

“I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Tracy Hammond and the members of the Sketch Recognition Lab who provided feedback on my written drafts and practice talks,” Rajanna said. “Also, I served as a graduate teaching fellow for two semesters, where I was mentored by Dr. John Keyser, Dr. Dilma Da Silva, Dr. Joseph Hurley, Dr. Aakash Tyagi and Dr. Vikram Kinra, who offered a significant learning experience.”

Rajanna’s ongoing research is centered on developing eye-movement based authentication methods to prevent shoulder surfing attacks, which occur in crowded places where it is easy to peer over another’s shoulder and steal potentially sensitive information, and achieving faster text entry in virtual reality using eye movements.

Computer science seniors demonstrate innovation at NASA Design Challenge Showcase

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 CST

Four students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University participated in the Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC) NASA Design Challenge Showcase, held Nov.14 in Houston.

The Aurora Aggies consisted of computer science seniors Walter Pospick, Alyssa Valdez, Natalie Criscione and Kevin Lewis. Out of 14 teams across Texas, they placed fourth overall, fourth in poster presentation and first in oral presentation for their project,“Intelligent Lighting Control Systems.”

The objective of their project was to design an intelligent lighting control system that supports biological circadian rhythms and adapts over time, providing a healthy living environment for astronauts that is easy to control.

“I had fun working with my group and NASA on this project. It was a great opportunity to work on a solution to a real-world problem that NASA is trying explore,” Valdez said.

The TSGC Design Challenge, which is sponsored by NASA and administered by the Texas Space Grant Consortium, is a unique academic experience offering undergraduate students an opportunity to propose, design and generate a solution toward solving research objectives of importance to NASA and its mission.

The Aurora Aggies are enrolled in a capstone course taught by Dr. Bruce Gooch, an associate professor in the department.

“We were told that the program was closed,” Gooch said. “I told the students we could do the work anyway. NASA ended up opening a competition for inclusion in the program based on a preliminary plan and this group won. They have been fighting from the beginning.”

The overall experience provides student team members with an opportunity to engage in scientific research, hands-on design, space-related career opportunities, communication skills and educational outreach.

Wang presents at Lenovo AI Innovation Challenge and Computing Community Consortium

Thu, 07 Dec 2017 00:00:00 CST

Dr. Atlas Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, was recently selected as a university challenge winner for the Lenovo AI Innovation Challenge, and was invited to give a presentation at the Supercomputing Conference (SC), held Nov 12-17 in Denver, Colorado.

The Lenovo AI Innovation Challenge was created to recognize the great and groundbreaking research in the fields of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Winners were selected from global top universities such as Yale University, Oxford and the University of Washington.

During the Lenovo Innovation Challenge, each university challenge winner gave a 45-minute presentation on their research related to artificial intelligence and high performance computing. Wang presented his research on “Exploiting Low-Quality Visual Data Using Deep Networks.”

While many sophisticated models are developed for visual information processing, very few pay attention to their usability in the presence of low-quality data. Most successful models are trained and evaluated on high-quality visual datasets. On the other hand, the data source often cannot be assured of sufficiently high quality in practical scenarios, with degradation factors abundant outside of the controlled research environment.

Wang’s research focuses on the robust sensing, processing and understanding of low-quality visual data using deep learning methods. His works are expected to generate broad impacts on real-world computer vision applications such as traffic monitoring, security surveillance and video communication.

Wang was also selected to present at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Oct 23-24 in Washington, D.C. The mission of CCC is to propel the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. This year, 47 early-career faculty members and researchers across the United States from most fields of computer science are invited to present their research, and Wang is one of them. Wang introduced his robust computer vision works.

Enhancing health care through data mining

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 00:00:00 CST

To solve a problem you often need to find a pattern. The deeper understanding researchers have of the factors and implications of clinical conditions, the closer they are to offering prevention and better care practices to patients.

Dr. Bobak Mortazavi, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, is working on a project to develop medical sensors that produce data for tracking risk factors for various cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attacks and heart failure.

Mortazavi is using data mining, which is a way of examining large data sets in order to generate new information, and machine learning applications to design clinical decision support systems and research clinical outcomes.

“We can create models to predict the risk of complications for a patient using data available in clinical records, as well as personal and wearable sensors,” Mortazavi said. “Then we use these outcome models to lead the design of new sensing systems in order to create dynamic, personalized predictions based upon each patient’s daily data.”

By developing medical sensors to track these risk factors on a daily basis, Mortazavi and his team have the ability to better understand long-term modeling of biomedical data, to understand and design metrics for improvement in care, and to potentially identify new characteristics of clinical conditions to improve personalized patient care.

The knowledge of the medical field is not enough to understand the engineering and development of the tools. On the flip side, understanding clinical research also is not solely useful for developing the newest sensing and learning techniques. Without thorough knowledge of each, certain advancements would simply be impossible.

“The importance of this work is in its truly interdisciplinary nature,” Mortazavi said. “Through our collaborations, we aim to train researchers in all components of this end-to-end research. From the sensing systems, we teach how users collect data; to the data mining and machine learning applications, we teach them to identify clinically-relevant patterns in data. Most importantly, we all learn to understand the lessons from this data to assist in clinical decision-making and increase the potential of improving patient care.”

Mortazavi first began studying this topic in 2014 when he completed his postdoctoral studies at the Yale School of Medicine. His doctorate studies involved human activity recognition, wearable sensors and exergaming, the development of gaming applications in user cyber physical systems to encourage activities with sports-levels of intensity. While those systems worked in short spurts, he became interested in learning how to apply such systems for longer-term use for clinical utility.

These studies include learning how long-term use of the systems can affect clinical adverse events, how to identify risks of those events, and how to design the user interfaces to such systems so the patients and clinicians can have improved decision-making about trajectories of care.

Mortazavi, who is a member of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Center for Remote Health Technologies and Systems, is collaborating with researchers and faculty members within the center and the department, such as Dr. Atlas Wang, assistant professor; Dr. Theodora Chaspari, assistant professor; Dr. Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna, professor; and Dr. Roozbeh Jafari, associate professor in computer science, biomedical, and electrical and computer engineering.

He also has collaborators outside of Texas A&M, such as Dr. Harlan Krumholz, who serves as the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and professor in the Institute for Social and Policy Studies, of Investigative Medicine and of Public Health (Health Policy); director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale-New Haven Hospital; and co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University.

Though he and his team are currently focused on cardiovascular diseases, Mortazavi hopes to branch out to a number of other health conditions in the future.

Aggies Invent: Students help shape the future of augmented and virtual reality

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 00:00:00 CST

Dell sponsors event, provides expertise and technology to students

Nearly everyone buys a car at some point, however, driving to a dealership, talking to a salesman, hassling with the negotiation, filling out paperwork and going for a test drive can be a nightmare. Imagine being able put on some glasses, rev the engine and see the car you wanted, right from the comfort of your couch.

Or imagine going to work in a factory and being able to see where invisible chemicals have leaked, alerting you to potential danger and allowing you to escape in time. With virtual and augmented reality, the world is poised to become a safer, more practical place. And if you ask any of the 56 students who participated in the most recent Aggies Invent, an intensive design experience offered at the Texas A&M Engineering Innovation Center, they’ll tell you the world will be a more exciting place as well.

Augmented and virtual reality is taking the world by storm. Technology leader, Dell, sponsored this Aggies Invent and brought all the latest technology and expertise for students to explore possible solutions to real world problems. Joining them were sponsors from Accenture, who brought the strategy and business side of these solutions. Meta rounded out the technology with their newest virtual reality headset. For 48 hours the students focused on finding a solution to a need statement provided by Dell and Accenture. The companies asked the students how this future technology could solve problems they face today and in the future. Students took these prompts and developed innovative ideas and solutions.

Over the course of the two days, 10 teams created a business model, a presentation and a video. On Sunday, the pressure was high as students presented to a panel of judges, who were experts in augmented and virtual reality. The judges included senior executives from Dell and Accenture, as well as the director of the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University.

In the end, a three-person team was declared the champion and each member was awarded a Dell Precision 5520 Mobile Workstation. The winning team developed a business solution called “Shovel” that would allow workers wearing augmented reality glasses to “virtually dig” and see where pipes are located underground, allowing construction workers to know where it is safe to dig to place new utilities.

Team members were Mike Momin, computer science student; and Mike Choi and Ayaz Abdullah, computer engineering students. When asked if they will take their business model and transform it into a real business, they paused and said “why not.”

“It’s all a matter of getting all the resources together and seeing if we can materialize it,” Abdullah said.

And just like that a business is born which, in the end, is the goal of the Engineering Entrepreneurship Program, according to director Rodney Boehm, creator of Aggies Invent.

“Aggies Invent gives students a chance to solve problems facing today’s society using the latest technology and support from industry and university mentors,” said Boehm. “They are so motivated that when we give them a creative environment and support, they amaze us with what can be designed and built in just 48 hours. We are seeing the next startup companies created right before our eyes.”

Aggies Invent is open to all Texas A&M students, who participate for many reasons. A big draw for sophomore electrical engineering student, Kamal Kraigheh, was the opportunity to play with augmented and virtual reality.

“I’m in AggiE_Challenge, and I’ve been doing virtual reality work as part of that,” he said. “When I actually started researching virtual reality this year, I realized there is so much potential. We are definitely going to see this in the future, and I’m really excited to start working on it and to be on the forefront of that.”

The second place team developed a business plan called “AKU” which would change the car-buying experience by allowing a customer to interact with a dealer remotely and customize a car to his or her specifications while viewing the vehicle in different environments.

The third place team developed a system using augmented reality, which would allow a construction company to easily see where mistakes are happening in real time, greatly reducing the amount of costly errors. “ARrchitecture” would also allow customers to live stream with experts elsewhere to get assistance, without having to wait for them to come to their location.

Business student Allison Kornher, who was on the third place team, enjoyed the experience because she said it will prepare her for her future career. This is the second time she’s participated in Aggies Invent.

“I wanted to meet students who are interested in entrepreneurship on the engineering side since I am a business student,” she said. “I want to be able to show that I can collaborate with engineers.”

The next Aggies Invent will take place in February, and will be a global collaborative [U] Invent™ event — “Invent for the Planet.”