We want to make sure that the women have a good research experience and learn to work together as a team. We're going to track the students over the next couple of years and see how this program affects their choices on their career paths. The second year's awards will be announced June 30 for the 1999-2000 academic year. The research projects are conducted at the students' home institutions and must be directly related to computer science or computer engineering and be suitable for undergraduate research. The entire student research team must consist of two to three undergraduate women who are entering their junior or senior year and majoring in computing.
Most teams have three members, although the first year had one team with four members.
More than 20 project proposals were submitted. I'm looking forward to some strong proposals this year from students and their advisors. Smart objects are physical objects in the real world that serve as input devices to a computer system. The goal is to reach those students who are turned off by math and science and provide a way for them to learn collaboratively by manipulating real objects in the world around them. In this project, they developed, on Apple Macintosh computers, a visual environment for robots that will allow empirical analyses of robot behavior.