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 fourth year's awards will be announced June 30 for the 2001-2002 academic year. The research projects are conducted at the students' home institutions. The project research 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, entering their junior or senior year, who are majoring in computing.
Most teams have three members, although the first year had one team with four members.
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 currently turned off by math and science, providing a way for them to learn collaboratively by manipulating real objects in the world around them. In this project, they developed a visual environment for robots. Such an environment, developed on Apple Macintosh computers, will allow empirical analyses of robot behavior.