Every spring, the College of Natural Sciences celebrates its student-scientists at the Undergraduate Research Forum, a one-day event. More than 200 students present posters describing their research. The best and most innovative posters and presentations are recognized with awards judged and sponsored by the university, faculty, alumni, and industry.

The 2012 Undergraduate Research Forum took place on Friday, April 13, 2012 from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the Robert A. Welch main hallway.

UTCS had 18 posters and 29 poster presenters. There were 72 collaborators on the research projects, including faculty members and students.

Two UTCS students' presentations were aimed at teaching computer science. Samantha Salinas, Victor Adossi, David Finol, and David Portillo presented “Computer-supported Collaborative Learning and Its Impact in Introductory Computer Science Courses,” in collaboration with Juan Sequeda. Presenter Joanna Smith collaborated with Elliot Kramer, Joe Tessler, and Calvin Lin on their poster titled “Teaching students to be better testers.”

Two of UTCS’s Freshman Research Initiative streams had presentations at the forum: “Computational Intelligence in Game Design,” led by Risto Miikkulainen, and “Autonomous Vehicles,” led by Peter Stone. Eight of the presenters were from the Game Design stream and two were for the Autonomous Vehicles stream. UTCS students also presented for the Functional Genomics Research stream and the Computational Evolution stream.

Congratulations to our 2012 Forum Award and Fellowship Winners!

CA Technologies, Inc. Award for Excellence in Computer Science Research ($500)

“Composing Piano Music Using Neural Networks”

Presenters: Winston Wu, Darius Xu, and Josh Slocum

Collaborators: Uli Grasemann and Risto Miikkulainen

Schlumberger Award for Excellence in Computer Science Research ($500)

“Approximately Orchestrated Routing and Transportation Analyzer: Large-scale Traffic Simulation for Autonomous Vehicle”

Presenters: Dustin Carlino and Michael Depinet

Collaborators: Piyush Khandelwal and Peter Stone

In addition to awards for presentations at the Undergraduate Research Forum, two UTCS students who applied for the College of Natural Science’s summer research program won fellowships:

Microsoft Corporation Summer Research Fellowship ($1000)

Josan Munoz (Freshman)

Oracle Summer Research Fellowship ($1000)

Kathryn Ann Spradlin