GCoE Undergraduates Making Their Mark in Research

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The fall semester is well underway in the Gallogly College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. And with that, undergraduate students are being recognized at conferences, seminars and competitions. Recent awardees hail from the School of Computer Science (CS), School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME) and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).  

AME senior Preetha Thanunathan was part of a team winning second place in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) Innovation Challenge in Orlando, Florida. “This was a 48-hour hackathon. We received 48 hours to ideate, prototype and present our product,” she said. 

Thanunathan's team produced an affordable small-sized drone, Sky Findr, that helps locate a missing child within a crowd, such as at a theme park. The prototype included custom Python-based facial recognition software. The team won $4,000 provided by Rockwell Automation and was comprised of students from Arizona State University and Texas A&M Corpus Christi. The competition was part of the 2021 SHPE National Convention with over 9,000 in attendance.  

Two students in the Gallogly College of Engineering were recognized at the OK-LSAMP 27th Annual Research Symposium. The Oklahoma Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) is a consortium of Oklahoma colleges and universities working together to develop programs aimed at increasing the number of students from under-represented populations who receive degrees in STEM disciplines. Learn more.

CS senior Makya Stell won first place in Non-Life Sciences Poster Presentations at the OK-LSAMP 27th Annual Research Symposium. 

Stell's work focused on visual safety and security software, a proposed mitigation technique for visual privacy leaks on social media networks. Stell describes her work as such, "Visual Security Safety (VSS) is an application that can be enabled and disabled by the user to protect them every time they open apps that have permission to access the camera." Assistant Professor Christan Grant and Jasmine DeHart, PhD student, both in the School of Computer Science, provided Stell with project advice. 

ECE sophomore Lucia Torres was awarded first place at the OK-LSAMP 27th Annual Research Symposium for her presentation titled “Puddle Detection with Computer Vision for Self-Driving Cars.” 

Torres' abstract reads, “with the emergence of self-driving cars, accurate and robust automated techniques to detect hazards on the road are needed to prevent accidents in degraded driving conditions. An important class of road hazards are water puddles, which are the focus of this work.” 


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