Page 18 - NCAT Magazine Fall 2018
P. 18
caMPUs highlights
The auTonomous
auTo (a3) Team recently
completed the first year of the
students three-year SAE International
and General Motors (GM)
AutoDrive Challenge, walking
away with an overall score
landing them in top 10
standing. The team placed
third in the straight-line sioBahn day successfully defended her
challenge, autonomously dissertation to become the first woman to
following a two-mile track graduate A&T’s computer science doctoral
in the shortest timeframe degree program. Day began work on the
while appropriately following faculty at The University of North Carolina
stop signs and general traffic at Greensboro this fall. She will continue
obstacles. Held in Yuma, her research of the authorship of tweets
Arizona, the competition on Twitter.
required teams to operate and
successfully navigate their
transformed autonomous cars
through three main dynamic Junior journalism and mass communication
challenges: straight line, lateral multimedia student denVer lark spent
and object detection and approximately two months traveling the
avoidance. country as a 2018 Chevrolet and National
Newspaper Publishers Association “Discover the
More than 30 undergraduate Unexpected” Journalism Fellow. Lark is among
and graduate students six students chosen from historically black
are involved in the project colleges and universities for the fellowship. In two
with different backgrounds groups of three, the students will explore and share positive, inspirational
and disciplines in Image and relevant stories from African-American communities.
Processing and Learning;
Software Architecture and Tony WaTlingTon Jr., senior economics student and SGA senator,
Functional Safety Analysis; is helping to close the diversity gap on Capitol Hill. Watlington was
Sensor Integration; CPU/ a summer intern for the third class of the Congressional Bipartisan
FPGA; Control and Dynamics; HBCU Caucus, which was launched in 2016 by co-chairs, U.S. Rep. Alma
Mechanical Design; Social Adams and U.S. Rep. Mark Walker. The first of its kind, the program
Responsibility; and Social gives two interns the opportunity to spend four weeks in the office of
Media and Outreach. The both a Republican and a Democrat.
second leg of the competition
is scheduled for May 2019.
Mid-challenge targets will A team of seven A&T students traveled to Van Nuys, California, to compete
focus on enhanced autonomy at the SAE International Aero Design West competition. They returned
levels of the self-driving cars home the best team in the country. naThan Blake, Jhalyn daVis,
by avoiding dynamic obstacles simon esau, Xinru niu, ChrisToPher PloTT, Jasmine shaW and
and safely passing through Chad sTaPles worked together on the NC(AT)2 Team to create and
intersections, challenging road operate an aircraft. Their work earned second-place overall in the regular
conditions and multiple lane class—the Elliott & Dorothy Green Overall Regular Class Award—behind a
changing. team for Politechnika Poznanska (Poland), with Universidad Aeronautica
en Queretaro (Mexico), Ningxia University (China) and Warsaw University
of Technology (Poland) rounding out the top five.
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