October 2017 -

This was my first time attending the HENAAC- Great Minds in STEM Conference, celebrated in Pasadena California (October 18-22, 2017). I was honored to be a NSF ASSIST Travel grant recipient (#EEC-1548322) and participate in the NSF Leverage/ASSIST Early-Career Faculty Development Symposium. This was a great experience in which I was able to network with other peers, early faculties, and key members of several funding agencies and universities. Additionally, the workshops of the Symposium were tailored to early and prospective faculties, covering topics from building and managing efficient research teams, to ensuring and requesting funding from a wide range of agencies and organizations.

Moreover, in this conference, we were able to present our work “Towards Personalized Performance Feedback by Mining the Dynamics of Facial Keypoint Data” which aims to tackle one of the grand engineering challenges of the 21st century: the Development of Personalized Learning. We were honored to receive the 2nd place in the Research Poster Graduate competition in the Engineering/Technology category. This award highlights that the community recognizes our hard work and the importance of our research.

Also, I was able to help Penn State in the recruitment of minorities and underrepresented students that are planning to pursue a graduate career in the STEM fields. This is a constant pursuit of Penn State, especially the Center for Engineering Outreach and Inclusion. During the career-fair, I had the privilege to meet, talk with, and advise several great students who were interested in advancing their engineering careers.

Here are a few pictures of the conference and a few of the great technologies present at the conference.

(PS: The first night we had a Dinner reception at Caltech, with several great speakers. Even though we did not meet Sheldon or Leonard, I did find the “The Big Bang Theory ” way, see picture below)

The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Mid-Atlantic Section Fall 2017 Conference, which took place at Penn State Berks from October 6-7, was a great opportunity to learn the research work of other peers in the field of Eng. education. In this conference, I had the chance to present a novel method that integrates intelligent system technology, computer vision, and machine learning to provide real-time ergonomic feedback and educational content to students. Our paper titled “Towards Real-time Ergonomics Feedback and Educational Content with the use of Co-Robots“ (see PDF) presents our method and an overview of recent advancements in technology that make this proposed method feasible.

In our presentation, we had several videos that illustrated the state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms and machine learning applications in Eng. education. Here are just a couple of pictures of our presentation (see presentation).