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I was excited to attend this great festival. The 2018 USA Science & Engineering Festival was the most exciting, educational, and entertaining STEM festival in the US. The festival took place in Washinton D.C., from April 7-8th. There were so many exciting technologies to see, but it was most rewarding to see the passion of so many kids and young adults for the STEM fields. Big companies, universities, and federal agencies were present (e.g.,  Lockheed Martin, RIT, PSU, NSF, NIH, and more). Here are just a few of the pictures I took (for more visit #scifest).

The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Mid-Atlantic Spring  2018 Conference, which took place at the University of the District of Columbia from April 6-7, was a great opportunity to network with peers in the field of Eng. education. In the conference, I served as a co-chair alongside Dr. Rocia Alba-Flores. Moreover, I had the opportunity to present our paper “Towards Personalized Performance Feedback: Mining the Dynamics of Facial Keypoint Data in Engineering Lab Environments“. This work is the continuation of our research on mining students’ facial expression and implementing machine learning models to predict their performance prior to the start of a task. The proposed individual-task machine learning model was validated with data of students collected in an engineering lab environment. The performance of the model shows its potential to advance the field of personalized learning. This paper won the Mid-Atlantic ASEE Best Paper Award (see presentation). Similarly, we presented a poster titled “Exploring Human-Co-Robot Interactions: Real-time Feedback or not?“.  In this work, we started exploring the effects that real-time feedback has on student performance, and how it might be counterproductive (under certain circumstances) provide students with real-time feedback of their performance (e.g., negative performance feedback).

I have to thank the Center for Engineering Outreach and Inclusion at Penn State, especially Mrs. Helen Edson and Mrs. Erin Hostetler, for the financial support and help provided that allowed me to attend this conference. Here are just a few pictures of the event.

We took part in the 2018 Institute for CyberSiciene (ICS) symposium: Harnessing the Power of Data at Penn State.   This one-day conference, that focused on innovative computational research in the fields of Precision Health, Cybersecurity, and Smart Communities. During this event, we presented, our work on “Personalized gamification to promote physical activity“. There were several interesting panel discussion, especially on the topic of precision and personalized health. Dr.Jame R. Broach, from the Institute of Personalized Medicine, gave a great presentation about using genomics to advance the field of personalized medicine. Here are few pictures.

We were one of the 214 graduate students to present their research at the 2018 Penn State Graduate Exhibition. We presented our work done on facial keypoint data mining to improve personalized feedback, titled: “Towards Personalized Performance Feedback by Mining the Dynamics of Facial Keypoint Data”. People had a great time interacting with the DATA Lab Co-Robot Penny and its facial recognition capabilities. Here are some pictures of the event.

I was able to be part of the 2018 Emerging Research National (ERN) Conference in STEM, celebrated in Washington, D.C. (February 22nd-24th). There were several great speakers, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) presenting how the responses to last year’s storms are offering lessons on resiliency and opportunity in the Caribbean (see article here).

During the ERN conference, we were part of the Graduate Fair and represented the Multicultural Engineering Graduate Association from Penn State. During the conference, we assisted Dr. Gersie from the Applied Research Laboratory and their D.O.O.R Summer program, as well as the Center for Engineering Outreach and Inclusion in the search and recruitment of minorities and underrepresented students that are planning to pursue a graduate education in the STEM fields.

Once again, we were delighted to be part of the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (IME) Department Graduate Open House.  There we had the opportunity to meet prospective graduate students and talk about all the great things the IME department, Penn State, and Happy Valley has to offer. Moreover, we won first place in the poster competition!!  in which the same prospective students judged existing IME graduate students’ research on their quality of presentation and intellectual contribution to the research community.  I hope to see all of them next fall semester, pursuing high-quality research here at Penn State.

On November 9th 2017, I was honored to be part of the NSF National Robotics Initiative PI Meeting celebrated in Arlington, VA. There we presented an updated on the research works funded by the NSF NRI “Real Time Observation, Inference and Intervention of Co-robot Systems Towards Individually Customized Performance Feedback Based on Students’ Affective States“ (# 1527148 )(see PSU news article). Dr. Tucker provided the project progress update during the afternoon long talk section, while I presented some of our finding and our Co-robot Penny during the morning poster section (see presentation).

There were several interesting talks and panels in which world-renowned researchers in Robotics and AI discussed the future of these fields and the impact these technologies will have in our future.  Here just a few of pictures of the event and our Penny the Co-robot.

I had a great time at the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) 2017 Conference celebrated in Kansas City, MO (November 1st-5th, 2017).Once again,  I was honored to be an NSF ASSIST Travel grant recipient (#EEC-1548197) and participate in the NSF Leverage/ASSIST   Faculty Development Institute. This was a great experience in which I was able to network with faculties from all around the US. The Institute had some stimulating workshops regarding NSF CAREER awards and other grants opportunities.

Furthermore, I was honored to be the keynote speaker for the Biomedical and Bioengineering Engineering Science Symposium Oral Presentation session. There I presented some of the work being conducted by the NSF Center for Health Organizational Transformation (CHOT) at PSU. Moreover, our presentation, titled “Machine learning Applications: Towards personalized medicine and biomechanical modeling” (see presentation), introduced students to the current applications of Machine Learning in the Biomedical and Bioengineering fields. I also served as a judge for this section, so congratulations to Wendy Alvarez on winning the first place in the oral presentation competition (see her picture receiving the prize from the hands of Dr. Gaedicke, Engineering Science Symposium chair, below). She presented her research in the Biomedical and Bioengineering section, so I was able to see at first hand her exceptional work. I also assisted as a judge for the poster competition, so congratulation to Mariana Flores, winner of the poster session.

We also were part of the Graduate Fair, assisting Dr. Gersie from the Applied Research Laboratory, the Center for Engineering Outreach and Inclusion, and the Multicultural Engineering Graduate Association from Penn State in the search and recruitment of minorities and underrepresented students that are planning to pursue a graduate career or job in the STEM fields. During the fair, I had the privilege to meet, talk with, and advise several great students who are already doing some interesting research work.

Here are a few pictures of the conference. Again the Air Force Research Laboratory always showcases some interactive and engaging technologies.

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).