David Turner, computer engineering senior in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, is a Finalist in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards for 2014.
The CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards recognize undergraduate students who show exceptional research potential in an area of computing research. Notable qualities of the nominees include making significant contributions to more than one research project, authoring or coauthoring multiple papers, making presentations at major conferences, and producing software artifacts that were in widespread use. Nominees have been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, are teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and have had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts.
CRA cited David Turner for his work on "Mechanix - Free Body Diagram and Truss Analysis Sketch Workbook," for which he received CRA's Honorable Mention last year, and "CourseSketch."
"I have always loved difficult problems and there seems to be a never ending stream of them with these projects," David said. "Mechanix and CourseSketch both use sketch recognition to improve education and help aid teachers understand the mistakes that students make and even sometimes correct students' problems automatically. Mechanix is in conjunction with people in the Mechanical Engineering department at Georgia Tech; they provide use cases for the software and help make sure it works."
David is a Sketch Recognition Lab team member and is advised by Dr. Tracy Hammond, associate professor and SRL director. His main research interest is sketch recognition and his secondary interest is improving education, "but I just really love the magic that artificial intelligence can provide," adds David.
When asked about his extracurricular activities and plans for the future, David had this to say: "Outside of school I am in Percussion Studio where I play percussion and participate in gigs and a concert every semester. This summer I have an internship at Amazon but in the fall I will be in graduate school working on CourseSketch." This past summer David was an intern at Google in California.