IEEE scholarships and competitions provide students with the opportunity to display their technical and leadership skills.
ABOVE: 2012 IEEE President-elect Gordon Day (l.) and 2011 President Moshe Kam (r.) present Alecio Binotto (center) from the Institute of Informatics Brazil with the top prize in the IEEE Presidents’ Change the World Competition. Binotto accepted the prize on behalf of this team for their PoaS@ude Telemedicine Project.
Power and Energy Scholarships Awarded
Ninety-three electrical engineering undergraduates from 51 U.S. universities won IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Scholarship Plus awards for the 2011-12 academic year. The goal of the scholarships is to increase the number of well-qualified, entry-level engineers in the power and energy industry. The scholarships are distributed through the IEEE Power & Energy Scholarship Fund and provide up to three years of financial support. To qualify, students must be U.S. electrical engineering undergraduates and meet a range of other criteria. Over 700 students from 107 U.S. universities applied via the scholarship Web site, launched in April 2011.
Smart Grid Video Addressing Social Media Wins First Place
At the IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications in Brussels, Belgium, students entered videos as part of the IEEE student engineering competition for innovating the smart grid. Videos were made in two categories, explaining innovative smart grid concepts and showing the benefits of smart grid. Austin Montgomery of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, won the Student Video Competition for his video, “Making the Smart Grid Smarter with Social Media.”
Students Provide Solution for Remote Health Care
A team of students from Brazil earned the top prize in the IEEE Presidents’ Change the World Competition for their PoaS@ude Telemedicine Project, which enables doctors to perform remote prenatal ultrasounds. The project provides real-time e-health solutions and promotes prevention programs for people living in remote areas with limited access to medical care. The Brazil team members received top honors and the title of “IEEE Student Humanitarian Supreme.”
IEEE Outstanding Paper Award Announced
Postgraduate student Kahesh Dhuness and Professor Sunil Maharaj of the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa won the IEEE Outstanding Paper Award at the IEEE Africon 2011 Conference, where a total of 307 papers were received and reviewed by 449 peers from around the world. Their paper, “A Cognitive Radio Application of OM-OFDM for Implementation in DVB-T2,” proposed using offset modulation (OM-OFDM) for cognitive radio applications.
IEEE Africon 2011 was themed “Sustainable Energy and Communications Development for Africa” and held in Zambia from 13-15 September 2011. It was the largest in the event’s 10-year history, with over 300 delegates attending, more than 40 percent of them from outside Africa.
High School Student’s Project Deters Car Accidents
Jessica Richeri thought a smarter transportation system could be a solution to the unsafe, crowded highways of the future. After three years of work—beginning at age 14—and 20,000 lines of code, she developed an autonomous vehicle able to recognize and avoid obstacles and, hopefully, prevent accidents. Unlike previous driverless robotic vehicles, Richeri’s car can adapt to its environment without first knowing the details of the landscape through which it is traveling.
Richeri’s project, “Autonomous Robotic Vehicle: Saving Lives, Preventing Accidents One at a Time,” earned her the 2011 IEEE Presidents’ Scholarship. She has since graduated from Centennial High School in Corona, Calif., and enrolled in the electrical engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa.
IEEEXtreme Competition Exceeds Expectations
The cuSAT team from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, won the Grand Prize in the IEEEXtreme Programming Competition 5.0. The global competition challenged teams of IEEE Student Branch members to compete over a 24-hour span to solve a set of programming problems. The 2011 event attracted 1,161 student teams, a 53 percent increase over 2010, and included a total of 3,183 students from 65 countries and 253 university IEEE student branches. The winners received an all-expenses paid trip to an IEEE conference of their choice, anywhere in the world.
Students Compete by Building High-Performance Race Cars
Dartmouth University’s fifth annual Formula Hybrid Competition saw 21 teams compete over four days, with students from Texas A&M University winning first prize. The competition, jointly sponsored by IEEE and the Society of Automotive Engineers, was founded by the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth and features high-performance hybrid and electric race cars built by teams of undergraduate and graduate engineering students. Each day was dedicated to specific tasks: electrical and mechanical inspection, acceleration, design and marketing presentation, and finally an endurance event over 22 kilometers with a limited allotment of energy.
An Extraordinary Gesture
Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and IEEE China Operations initiated the “IEEE-MSRA Joint Program” in talent development in 2011. MSRA paid the student membership fees of its 300 interns in China, enabling them to join IEEE. In a collaborative exchange, IEEE China Operations personnel arranged for IEEE student branch representatives to visit and tour MSRA.
