![Multi-colored metallic confetti falling around three gold trophies.](_news-images/CSCE-News-AMSA-Research-Symposium-1March22.jpg)
Two senior capstone design project student teams from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University took the top spots in the engineering/mathematics category at the 2021 American Medical Student Association (AMSA) Research Symposium, held virtually in November.
Hosted by the local chapter of the AMSA within the Texas A&M College of Medicine, the symposium serves as a venue to showcase the impressive research projects being done by undergraduate students from all disciplines. The event emphasizes that research is for everyone.
Both teams were part of a capstone project class (CSCE 482-932) taught by Dr. Tracy Hammond, professor, and director of the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation and Sketch Recognition Lab.
The first-place team included Kara Capps, Lalit Bauskar, Jayant Singh, Ori Yonay and Alicia Yong. Their project was titled “Teaching Robots to See Clearly,and was sponsored by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory (ARL). The team worked with ARL to improve the performance of their machine-learning model on all types of objects, making future vehicles safer and contributing to the body of computer-vision research.
In computer vision, scene segmentation involves taking an image or 3D representation of an environment and classifying each pixel of that environment as a type of object. When used in 3D sensors for autonomous vehicles, it locates objects — such as trees, bicycles, pedestrians, roads, etc. — that appear in front of the car so that the vehicle knows what to avoid.
Second place belonged to team members Phi Thauan Au, Kaylie Gonzalez, Suyesh Prabhugaonkar and Ruben Uribe for their project, “KeyCuts: Keyboard-Based Browser Extension for Boosting Browser Productivity.”
Inspired by features of the popular internet search engine DuckDuckGo, the team developed a keyboard-based Google Chrome extension that would allow users to perform text-based shortcuts from the search bar on any browser. With their extension, users will be able to make the shortcuts themselves so that the websites that have these shortcuts will be personalized. The team believes that the ability to personalize shortcuts will open up opportunities to increase productivity and time management. In addition, they added different functions, such as workspaces, that would enable users to open a custom group of multiple sites/applications at once with a single shortcut.