UWF student teams place first and second in international engineering contest
Two UWF student teams were recently selected for the first and second place prizes for the Myron Zucker Undergraduate Student Design Contest, a prestigious international competition.
The annual contest is sponsored by the Industry Applications Society (IAS), a special interest society within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The awards will be presented during the 2013 IAS annual meeting, which will be held Oct. 6-11 in Orlando, Fla.
This year, seniors Nathaniel Eubanks, Chris Hayes, Vadim Ilin and Andrew Potter were selected as the recipients of the first place award for their project, Design of a Solar Array Positioning Controller. Drs. Bassam R. Shaer and Muhammad H. Rashid advised the team at the REEF campus at UWF Emerald Coast. The award will include $800, to be split among the team members, $500 for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, one free year of IAS membership, and reimbursed travel expenses to the IAS annual meeting.
The team’s paper – submitted as a component of the design project – has also been selected for publication in various books, magazines and science databases and presentation during the 11th International Conference on Embedded Systems and Applications. The conference will be held July 22-25 in Las Vegas.
Seniors Aster Pastoral, Chris Doorbal and Jon Lister, also advised by Bakhoum and Rashid, were selected for second place and will be awarded $600 to be split among the team, $400 for the department, a free year of IAS membership, reimbursed travel expenses to the annual meeting and more. Their project was a Design of a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) GPS Vehicle Tracking System.
The students completed their senior design projects as a requirement of the Capstone Design I and Capstone Design II courses at UWF. All project presentations and quality were assessed by engineering faculty members, who then decided on the projects to be nominated to the Myron Zucker Undergraduate Student Design Contest.
The last UWF team to place in the competition was in 2009. Nicholas Feilner and Thanh Dang’s design project, High Precision Intelligent Speed Control of Brushless DC Motor, came in third.
