1998-99 Outstanding Undergraduate Awards

The Computing Research Association honors the recipients of the 1998-99 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards competition, sponsored this year by the Microsoft Corporation and Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab.

The Outstanding Female Undergraduate Award went to April Rasala from Dartmouth College, and the Outstanding Male Undergraduate Award went to Marsette Vona, also of Dartmouth College. The runner-up for the male award was Pedro Felzenszwalb, Cornell University.

About the Winners

April Rasala is majoring in computer science in her senior year at Dartmouth College where she is a Rufus Choate Scholar. As a student research assistant, she worked on problems in bicriteria scheduling. Specifically, she looked at schedules that would (approximately) minimize both schedule length and average completion time. Her work led to improved bounds on the existence of schedules that are near optimal for both criteria. She also participated in CRA-W's Distributed Mentor Project, working last summer with researchers at the University of Washington on finding generic algorithms that perform well across a wide range of online problems. Her work analyzed the performance of one candidate for such a generic algorithm, the Work Function Algorithm. April has worked as a grader/section leader for several undergraduate courses and she has spent a quarter working as a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard.

Marsette Vona is also a senior Rufus Choate Scholar majoring in computer science at Dartmouth. He was nominated for his work on the design, construction, and control of self-reconfigurable robots. Self-configuring robots are made of identical robot modules that can dynamically change their internal geometric structure to adapt to their operating environment and required functionality. Marsette designed and built the first robotic module capable of three-dimensional self-reconfiguration. He made contributions to its fabrication process and control algorithms as well. He is now working both on creating and testing a distributed system of these robots and on developing a new self-configuring robotic design using cubic modules. Marsette is also the winner of the Francis L. Town Scientific Prize, the Philip R. Jackson Award, and the Microsoft Outstanding Junior Award.

Pedro Felzenszwalb (Runner-Up) is a senior majoring in computer science at Cornell University. He was nominated for his work on computer vision. Pedro became interested in image segmentation after several summers working on problems in digital compression at Xerox PARC. His research has led to the development of a formal characterization of certain desirable properties for segmentation and an efficient algorithm that produces segments having those properties. He has also worked on the design of robots whose motion, when it strayed from ideal, would be automatically corrected through the laws of mechanics. He has been a teaching assistant as well for undergraduate courses at Cornell.

Honorable mention was given to the following:

This year the selection committee consisted of Janice Cuny, University of Oregon; Greg Andrews, University of Arizona; and Larry Snyder, University of Washington.