End-of-semester showcases give students a chance to display their projects and hone their presentation skills

Every year, NYU Tandon holds a school-wide Research Excellence Exhibit that includes dozens of examples of the most exciting and promising work being done by faculty and students. Since its inception, it has become one of the most eagerly anticipated events on the school calendar, but it’s far from the only place to get a close-up look at what’s going on in Tandon’s classrooms and labs.

In the lead-up to the end of the semester, several professors, programs, and departments organized opportunities for students to present their work in front of an audience.

Ezgi Ozyilkan, a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), explains, “This lets students demonstrate their mastery of course material and the application of their knowledge to real-world problems. It’s also a fun opportunity to discover what others are working on and connect with peers outside of your immediate circles.”

With the Research Excellence Exhibit over, we’re revisiting a few of the other presentations that occurred in recent weeks.

It’s Electric!

Ozyilkan, who is advised by Institute Professor Elza Erkip, volunteered alongside fellow student Grace McGrath, a student of Assistant Professor Danny Huang, to organize an informative poster session for ECE doctoral candidates that drew some 20 participants and dozens of attendees. The tradition had been started three years earlier by another of Erkip’s students, Fabrizio Carpi, now a Senior Research Engineer at Samsung, and has grown each year since.

This year’s edition featured several projects that have already made news, ranging from democratizing the design of computer chips (Ph.D. candidate Andrew Hennessee, under the advisement of Institute Associate Professor Siddharth Garg) and leveraging large language models (Luca Collini, advised by Professor Ramesh Karri) to the cybersecurity of autonomous vehicles (Sayan Chakraborty, under the advisement of Institute Professor Zhong-Ping Jiang) and preventing backdoor attacks on Hardware Description Language (HDL) code generation (Likhitna Mankali, advised by Global Network Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ozgur Sinanoglu).

There was ample proof on display that, as Karri, who chairs the department asserts, “Electrical and computer engineers are at the forefront of creating some of the most advanced technologies the world has ever known.”

When humans and computers interact effectively, problems get solved

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow Dishita Turakhia has an overarching goal in mind: to teach students to create technology that will enhance the human experience.  

Since she arrived at NYU Tandon last year, her foundational course in human-computer interaction (HCI) has proven exceptionally popular, and considering the variety, creativity, and technical depth that students harness during her class, it’s easy to see why.  

“Students chose topics and problems to tackle that they felt strongly about, and they poured their efforts wholeheartedly into finding solutions,” Turakhia says. “The only limit was their imaginations.”

This year's theme was imagining the future with human-centered technology. The projects included platforms aimed at allowing nervous public speakers to practice in front of a virtual audience, shoppers to virtually try on clothes using AI-powered platforms and get suggestions for local sustainably produced garments, and patients to access physical therapy services using advanced computer vision techniques, as well as apps that help parents monitor the safety of their children’s online interactions, dog lovers judge a pet’s mood and level of aggression using AI, and hungry people locate the nearest food truck by cuisine and hours of operation.

There were even a few physical prototypes, such as SafeStride, a shoe-mounted sensor that can warn walkers with visual impairments about impending dangers.

One team, calling themselves AstroSense, left the bounds of Earth to come up with their project: a voice-controlled, wearable interface that would allow astronauts to monitor the integrity of their equipment and their own vital signs, and communicate more seamlessly with their crewmates.

Turakhia says, “As the ‘C’ in HCI changes at a mind-boggling pace, I want my students to keep the ‘H’ at the center of all that they design in the future, keeping in mind the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan's words: ‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.'”

Gearing up for their master’s degrees

Since 2015, Tandon’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering has offered a master’s program in Mechatronics and Robotics, allowing graduate students to delve into a field requiring a synergistic combination of mechanical structures, mechanisms, electrical and electronic components, electromechanical sensors and actuators, microcontrollers, and programming.

This month, the students in the program had a chance to explain their work — and while it was technically sophisticated (no surprise considering that complex, synergistic list of elements), it was also, in lay terms, simply very cool.

Presentations included:

• A lightweight exoskeleton that incorporates haptic feedback to make rehabilitative exercises more effective (presented by master’s candidate Harshavardhan Sanjiv Vibhandik)
   
• A safety tool for human operators of robotics systems that leverages motion prediction algorithms and digital twins (Rajasundaram Mathiazhagan, Sanjana Joshi, and Vadivelan Murugesan)
   
• A socially-aware service robot with abnormality detection that understands the environment, Interprets what it sees, explains its perception, and responds appropriately, rather than merely sensing (Sotomi Oluwadamilola and Devika Kodi)
   
• A virtual fencing framework that enhances the safety of human–robot collaboration without relying on physical barriers (Vineela Reddy Pippera Badguna)
   
• A hydraulic-powered soft, flexible robot for use by clinicians performing Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (Mohit Warke, Nikhil Khandelwal, Sai Nishit Ragupathy, and Yukteshwar Ravi)
   
• An integrated robotic system that makes the sorting of recyclables safer, less labor-intensive, and more accurate (Shagun Majotra, Jainam Kothari, Pranav Shukla, and Radhika Prayage)
   
• A semi-autonomous, four-wheeled robot that uses radar and cameras for real-time obstacle detection and emergency stopping, especially important in crowded or unpredictable environments (Priyadarshan Sabarikannan, Kaniska Harwani, and Jills Babu)

Organized by the program’s faculty members — who include Assistant Adjunct Professor Aliasghar Arab, Department Chair Katsuo Kurabayashi, and Industry Assistant Professor Rui (Ray) Li — the event also featured guest speakers Xuesu Xiao of George Mason University, who gave a fascinating presentation about robotic mobility in extreme real-world situations such as weather-related disasters; Simiao Niu, from Rutgers University, who spoke about his wearable energy harvest advancements; Tandon Professor Farshad Kohrrami, who discussed his research in Robotic Control Theories; and Jacqueline Libby of Stevens Institute of Technology, who completed her post-doctoral studies on soft robotics at Tandon in 2023.

Libby had high praise for Tandon, which she credits for setting her on the path to her own faculty lab, and for all the student presenters, who, she said, had shown both technical rigor and innovative thinking. “What you're doing is vital,” she told them. “The research that master’s students conduct is a significant component of a lab’s success.”