Bal initially majored in biology at Fordham, but he switched to computer science in his junior year. Working closely with Damian Lyons, Ph.D., director of the University’s Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, he used technology originally associated with gaming to help herpetologists at the zoo track and study the movements of Kihansi spray toads. The toads had been classified as extinct in the wild in 2009, but in the past decade, scientists at the Bronx Zoo, headquarters of the Wildlife Conservation Society, have been breeding the toads on site and helping to reintroduce them to their native habitat in Tanzania.

According to Lyons, Bal expanded the code to effectively track the toads solely using depth imagery. He also added a color-tracking feature so that made it possible to zero in on the toads when they moved, such as jumping onto a leaf. Bal also created new software to generate behavior analytics.

As an undergrad, Bal also was a volunteer EMT with Fordham University EMS, and he worked as a software engineer intern at Amazon, an experience he said he helped him not only get job offers but also learn “how to work professionally, scalably, and consistently in the real world.”

Today, he’s a software engineer at SpaceX, working on ground network software systems for Starlink, the aerospace manufacturer’s satellite internet service. But one day down the line, Bal said he hopes to launch his own company.

What Fordham course has had the greatest influence on you and your career path so far? How and why was it so influential?
Professor Damian Lyons’ Brains and Behaviors in Beasts and Bots. It was basically a class where we looked at different animal behaviors and then emulated them with robotics (e.g., a bug might walk around until it hits a wall, then it’ll turn and keep moving until it hits a wall, rotate, and so on. At one point we made a robot that did the same). It was a lot of fun, but I would say research outside of class was way more impactful. Classes are good for developing baseline skills, but the best way to solidify your knowledge, grow it, and put it to work is to utilize the resources available to students on campus outside of required coursework, like labs and research opportunities.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Definitely Lyons. Without the opportunities and encouragement he provided, I’m certain I wouldn’t have made professional progress at the same rate that I have. He introduced me to complex, real-world problems and helped me understand how to break them down into manageable chunks to create something useful. That overall thought process and all of the small nuances I learned along the way have been invaluable in my professional career.

What are you optimistic about?
I’m optimistic about our future. I think that the next few generations will have an extremely large impact on humanity’s trajectory due to their intersection with powerful and exciting technologies that they’ve grown up with, as opposed to previous generations that still remember what it was like to not have smartphones or the entire internet at their fingertips.

The program is currently accepting applications from potential students for enrollment in fall 2022.

Damian Lyons, Ph.D., professor of computer science, said the need for those with doctoral degrees in computer science is enormous, particularly in the private sector. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 15.3% increase from 2012 in the number of jobs in computer science requiring a doctorate degree by 2022.

Despite the strong market demand, there remains relatively low Ph.D. production in computer science, he said. Just 2% of all degrees conferred in the computer science discipline are doctorates, he noted, compared to 8% in the sciences, math, technology, and engineering fields overall.

He added that doctoral degrees are also becoming a more common prerequisite to private sector employment. Often, large, multi-sectoral organizations will reserve top-ranked positions for doctoral degree holders. For example, 16% of all positions at Google now require a doctorate.

A Focus on Ethics

A Ph.D. at Fordham will address more than just the technological aspects of the discipline, though. Students who earn the computer science doctorate will learn to wrestle with the thorniest issues of the field, including privacy and responsibility in fields such as artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity.

“Our program will promote ethically informed public-interest technological research,” Lyons said.

“The program is also unique in its commitment to training students in computer science pedagogy,” he said, “and in its commitment to engaging students in research within the first year of being in the program.”

The Ph.D. program is the latest expansion of Fordham’s focus on computer science education. In 2014, the department added a master’s in cybersecurity to its offerings, and a year later, it added a master’s degree in data science.

In 2017, Fordham was designated as a Center for Excellence in Cybersecurity by the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security. For 12 years, Fordham has hosted the International Conference on Cyber Security, jointly sponsored with the FBI.

A Research-Heavy Sequence

Research will be a key element of the Ph.D. program. Lyons noted that students will be required to take a research method class their first year and conduct an initial but significant supervised research project that will result in a peer-reviewed publication. That project may or may not be connected to their dissertation research, but it must be completed before any dissertation research can be proposed.

Students will be supervised and mentored at all stages throughout the program. “This curriculum has been designed to facilitate advising and nurturing students as they go through the process,” Lyons said.

The program is poised to offer students an excellent return on investment: It is estimated that 60% of computer science doctoral students enter private industry after graduating, at firms such as Google, Uber, Bloomberg, Microsoft, IBM, and others.

Artificial Intelligence: Seeing the Bigger Picture

Lyons is especially excited at the prospect of Fordham graduates addressing the challenges of artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity.

“There’s a great deal of information and sentiment out there about the role that such advanced computer science could play in society, with arguments spanning the spectrum from it being a tremendous good that will help everybody, to well-known comments by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk that it could lead to the downfall of society,” he said.

“The way you deal with that is, you ensure that the researchers you’re training understand that science is a part of society, that they aren’t so focused on the technical perspectives and excitement of what they’re doing that they don’t see the bigger, ethical picture.”

The 2021 Tri-State ExploreCSR workshop, which began in February and wrapped up last month, aims to fix that.

The workshop brought together students and faculty from Fordham, the Stevens Institute of Technology, the University of Connecticut, and Google to learn or brush up on coding and computer science-related research. On April 23, the group celebrated with online presentations, a panel discussion, and poster board presentations on team projects.

Funding and Participation from Google

Ying Mao, Ph.D., an assistant professor of computer science at Fordham, said the project, which was funded by an $18,000 grant from Google, was created to break down barriers that students from all underrepresented populations might feel are keeping them from entering computer science.

“When we wrote our proposal, we actually broadened the domain of who we wanted to offer it to; usually it’s just for women. We included first-generation students who might not have imagined doing something in computer science,” he said.

The April event not only brought the students together, it allowed them to hear from experts in the field. It started off with a keynote address, Combinatorial Fusion Analysis: A new paradigm for combining multiple scoring systems, which was delivered by Frank Hsu, Ph.D., the Clavius Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Fordham. He was followed by Adam Michael Wood of Google, who talked about Tensorflow, an open-source software platform that can be used to create machine learning models.

A panel discussion on the challenges and opportunities in computer science featured Fordham’s computer science professors Gary M. Weiss, Ph.D. and Damian Lyons, Ph.D., and the Stevens Institute’s Ye Yang, Ph.D., and Grace Bae, Ph.D.

Organizers put out the call for the in the beginning of the year and received 220 applicants from undergraduate students enrolled at 16 colleges throughout the tri-state region. Some were computer science majors looking for research opportunities; others were non-computer science majors. After an initial meeting on Feb. 22, the 58 chosen students were divided into 18 groups that met weekly to report on their progress.

Instilling Confidence

“Some of the research is very introductory level because the students are not from computer science backgrounds. One of my students was an economics major, so we designed a beginning research project so they could learn what computer science research looks like, to help them build self-confidence,” Mao said.

“They all showed how they learned to code and analyze the data, and since every group contained at least three students, how learned how to communicate with each other to build the project.”

Collaborating with Students from Other Universities

One of the students who attended was Navpreet Kaur, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. A math/economics interdisciplinary major, Kaur got involved in the field in earnest this fall, when she took her first class as part of a computer science minor. Under the guidance of Fordham’s Juntao Chen, Ph.D., the Ozone Park, Queens, resident worked with fellow Fordham student Maria Jara, as well as a student from Carnegie Mellon University and one from Hofstra University. Their project was titled “Fairness and Privacy in the Optimal Transport for Resource Allocation.”

The project involved applying a mathematical model used to determine how to allocate resources such as workers to places such as factories and mines so that they’re allocated fairly as well as efficiently. It’s the kind of formula that could also be applied to the distribution of vaccines.

“It seemed like a good opportunity to get experience, which I thought would help with internships or grad school, and just understanding how comp/sci really works,” she said.

Participating in the program introduced her to Fordham’s STEM program, and Kaur said she wants to take Dr. Chen up on the offer for more research opportunities next year. Working on the project made her feel confident that she’d be ready to participate in a larger research project that otherwise might seem overwhelming.

“I’m also glad we did it virtually since we were able to work with students from different universities with different backgrounds and different years,” she said. Working together with people with different experiences was very helpful.”

Mao said he plans to apply again for the grant next year and hold another workshop at a date to be determined.

Now, student-developed software that works with the camera technology promises to help conservationists better understand how to protect future generations of the toads so that they can continue to thrive in their natural habitat in Tanzania. Next year, two more students will pick up the project.

From Africa to the Bronx, and Back Again

Discovered in 1996, the Kihansi spray toad lived in a five-acre microhabitat created by the spray of waterfalls in the Kihansi Gorge, which came under threat with the construction of a nearby dam that dramatically changed the habitat and decreased the size of the mist zone. The species was last seen in the wild in 2005 and was declared extinct-in-the-wild by 2009 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, likely due to the environmental changes and the emergence of a deadly fungus.

As the toad population declined, a partnership between the Bronx Zoo and the Tanzanian government, and the World Bank facilitated the collection of 499 spray toads to be brought to the Bronx to initiate an off-site conservation program. Custom microhabitats replicating their home in Tanzania were built in bio-secure facilities at the Bronx Zoo and later at the Toledo Zoo where they successfully bred the toads in the hopes of reintroducing them to the wild.

Back in Tanzania, the government managed the Lower Kihansi Environment Management Project to create a gravity-fed misting system. The project resuscitated the toads’ habitat and in 2010 the first 200 toads were returned to Tanzania to a breeding facility at University of Dar es Salaam. The first of several reintroductions to the gorge occurred in 2013, making them the first amphibian species to be reintroduced after being declared extinct in the wild.

Enter Fordham

The Fordham piece of the project began about five years ago when Kelly Cunningham, FCRH ’14, worked with James MacDonall, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology, to study the pecking behavior of pigeons. At the time, contact switches and touch-screen sensors were the state of the art for recording pigeons pecking at a target as part of psychological learning experiments, but a disadvantage of that simple mechanism is that when the pigeons’ beaks began to hurt, they stopped pecking at the switches. Further complicating things was the fact that this technology missed when pigeons were distracted or facing the wrong way, said Lyons.

As a computer scientist under the tutelage of Lyons, Cunningham worked in Fordham’s Computer Vision Lab to institute the use of the Microsoft Kinect sensor for the study. The Kinect is a motion-sensing input system initially developed for Xbox. Its cameras presented a flexible and inexpensive image-based approach to solving the tired-beak problem, as well as a way to observe behaviors beyond pecking.

Lyons and Cunningham wrote a paper published in a Psychometric Society journal in 2014 on their findings, which caught the eye of Avi Shuter at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo. Shuter is the Senior Wild Animal Keeper in the zoo’s Department of Herpetology.

He was researching the behavior of the Kihansi spray toad, and he thought the technology might be helpful in the zoo’s efforts to better understand the animal. He reached out to Lyons, who in turn put Armando Califano, FCRH ’17, GSAS ’19, on the case.

Taking the Toads to Task

With the help of an undergraduate research grant from Fordham College at Rose Hill, Califano refined the tracking system developed by Cunningham, shifting the camera from Microsoft Kinect to the Intel RealSense, which had more accurate depth perception. But Califano could only take the project so far before entering graduate school, and the experiment was put on hold.  That’s when Philip Bal, FCRH ’19, came into the picture.

In Bal’s junior year he decided to shift his focus from biology to computer science—making him a perfect candidate to pick up the project.  Over the past year and a half, Bal wrote new software that would use the camera to track the toads and generate behavior analytics, ultimately by distinguishing toads from other moving and stationary elements in their tanks. With Lyons overseeing the computer technology and Shuter overseeing the biology, Bal was able to further develop software that responded to the needs of zookeepers.

A Tiny Target

The average size of the toad is no more than an inch, at most. The tanks that they are kept in are the typical fish tank size, about two feet wide, two feet deep, and about three feet high. The camera sits an inch and a half away from the glass. Researchers choose a subsection of the tank to focus on, just a few dozen cubed inches along the bottom or the top. A focal length is established to determine how deep into the tank the camera will take measurements. The camera has two lenses: one that’s recording color, and infrared that records movement.

“We have to do a whole bunch of calculations, try to figure what’s actually a toad moving and eliminate the noise, like moving leaves,” said Bal. “The first thing we do to track toads is to match them to a particular movement.”

Providing a More Accurate Picture

The group gathered approximately two days of footage that took up four and a half terabytes of stored data. Up until then, previous behavioral studies relied on direct observations of toads by scientists at predetermined time intervals. Those projects were an important start, but this new technology and software will give researchers a more complete view of toad behavior, said Shuter.

“Previous studies almost didn’t see any toads hopping,” said Shuter, who worked with the Fordham students and Lyons. “This can be a pretty shy species of toad that hides or stays still when you walk by. A lot of their behavioral repertoire also seems to be made up of split-second movements, like quick calls or hops. So, that’s part of the reason why I thought that a system where a computer could catch all that would give us a more accurate idea of what’s going on.”

One of the things that distinguish the Fordham research from other studies on these toads was that the technology and software were new.

“This is from the ground up; it didn’t exist before,” said Shuter, adding that as a result, the project is more complex than previous studies. “I’m amazed that it has only taken this long to get to where we’ve gotten since it’s totally from scratch.”

Bal said that the project taught him quite a bit about programming.

“I learned what I was capable of, I created thousands of lines of code I never thought I would be able to write,” he said. “This is one of my favorite things to talk about, my passion project.”

Shuter said that when the zoo first recovered the toads in the year 2000, the focus at the time was to build up a colony in captivity that could be relied upon in the event that the wild population continued to decline. The zoo was able to bring the number of toads to almost 2,000 toads.

“The struggle back then was to make more, make more, make more, and we didn’t publish research about their natural history or biology, aside from what would keep them alive, healthy, and breeding in zoos,” said Shuter. “Now, we’re a little bit calmer and things are going well in Tanzania, and we have a good handle on how to keep them alive. So now, we’re starting to look more into, ‘what’s their behavior like?’”

At a recent meeting at the zoo, Bal presented some interactions he observed in the data, including “meetings” of toads, characterized by a certain distance between the toads and the amount of time spent together.

Shuter plans to continue observing these interactions, and also plans to examine fighting behaviors and look to tell them apart from mating—also referred to as amplexing.

And he may get some help from the next cohort of Lyons’ students.

“These guys might end up doing some track analysis for that,” said Lyons, gesturing to two younger students in the lab. “That’s great! We might be able to distinguish fights from amplexing.”

August marks one year since students from the Brazil Scientific Mobility Program (BSMP) arrived on campus. Run by the Institute of International Education and supported by the Brazilian government, BSMP places top-achieving junior and senior students pursuing STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at U.S. colleges and universities to gain global experience, improve their language skills, and increase international dialogue in science and technology.

The Fordham cohort—Aryadne Guardieiro Pereira Rezende, Tulio Aimola, Caio Batista de Melo, and Dicksson Rammon Oliveira de Almeida—have spent the year studying and researching alongside Fordham students and faculty.

“Fordham is a wonderful university. It teaches you to grow not just as a professional, but also as a person. I loved my semesters there,” said Guardieiro, a computer science major from Uberlandia, Minas Gerais.

Guardieiro worked with Damian Lyons, PhD, professor of computer and information science, on the use of drones to hunt and kill Aedes aegypti mosquitos, which spread diseases such as dengue and Zika virus, both of which are significant problems in Brazil.

“Different fields were available to research here,” said Batista de Melo, a computer science major from Brazil’s capital, Brasília. Batista de Melo researched with Frank Hsu, PhD, the Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science and Professor of Computer and Information Science, in Fordham’s Laboratory of Informatics and Data Mining.

“Our project used IBM’s Watson, which might not have been possible to use in Brazil, since it is such a new technology.”

The program has benefitted both Fordham and Brazilian students alike, said Carla Romney, DSc, associate dean for STEM and pre-health education, who oversaw BSMP at Fordham. Because it’s difficult for science students to devote a full semester to travel, the experience served as a sort of “reverse study abroad” for Fordham students.

“Having international students in the classroom has been an amazing internationalization experience for Fordham students, too,” Romney said. “It brings a different atmosphere into the classroom when you have students with widely divergent viewpoints and experiences. You get to know other cultures, other worlds.”

BSMP students complete two semesters of academic study at an American institution, followed by a summer of experiential learning in the form of internships, research, volunteering, or other types of “academic training.”

Earlier this summer, the four were joined by an additional 17 BSMP students who had been at other American colleges and universities and who took up residence at Fordham to undertake internships and positions at various New York City companies and organizations.

The experience was challenging both academically as well as personally, said Oliveira, a computer science major from Recife, Pernambuco who researched smartwatch applications in the Wireless Sensor and Data Mining (WISDM) lab with Gary Weiss, PhD, associate professor of computer and information science.

“The cultural shock was really unexpected, and for several months it made me feel uneasy,” Oliveira said. “Over time, I learned to overcome it. Being from a predominantly tropical country, I considered the winter to be the greatest challenge of all.”

In addition to culture shock, there was the inevitable loneliness, which Guardieiro said she felt deeply at times. However, she felt supported by her academic adviser and fellow students, and eventually came to love her newfound independence.

“I learned to never lose an opportunity to do what I needed or wanted to just because I did not have company to do so,” she said. “I learned to expose myself to new—and not always comfortable—experiences, and I was amazed with the results I got. I took dancing classes with great teachers, visited places like Wall Street companies and all kinds of museums, and visited many states by myself.”

The Brazilian government recently put a one-year moratorium on the scholarship exchange program, but Romney said Fordham would continue its partnership with the program when it resumes.

When it does, Guardieiro has advice ready for future Fordham-BSMP students:

“Don’t be afraid to do everything you want to… This kind of experience is given to us to learn as much as we can.”

That much information is both a blessing and a curse, because while more information than ever before is now available to professionals, it takes a rare set of skills to be able to analyze and extract the useful information from the vast quantity of data.

To help with that skillset, Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has unveiled a new master’s degree in data analytics, to debut this fall.

The degree is the third advanced degree, in addition to a master’s in computer science and one in in cyber security, to be offered by Fordham’s Department of Computer & Information Sciences.

Damian Lyons, PhD,, interim chair of the department, said that when looking at data analytics, experts in the field emphasize four V’s: volume, variety, velocity, and value.

“You’re looking for what is the useful trend or pattern that’s hidden in that vast amount of data, and you have to do it quickly because it may change in a moment.

“You have to look for the signal amidst the noise, as it were.”

Two courses—BIG DATA PROGRAMMING and CLOUD COMPUTING—have been created specifically for the interdisciplinary degree. The degree’s emphasis is also split into eight subspecialties:

• Big Data Computing and Networking
• Information and Cyber Security
• Bioinformatics and Health Informatics
• Financial Informatics
• Urban and City Informatics
• Election and Government Informatics
• Behavior Informatics
• Media Informatics

The first two specialties tackle the structure of big data, while the rest are geared to specific fields. In some areas of the economy, i.e., the financial industry, data analytics has long been an established part of doing business; in others, such as the medical field, it’s still a new development.

“We want to be able to provide those professionals with the background they need,” Lyons said. “They’re already professional in their own areas and [we]don’t aim to train them in those areas, but rather, in how data analytics can be leveraged in their area(s).”

The importance of the bioinformatics and health informatics area, for example, can be directly tied to a directive by the Affordable Care Act that heath care providers digitize patient information, he said. Data analytics can help providers put data to good use.

The information and cyber security area, on the other hand, addresses the flipside to having so much information at your fingertips. Unscrupulous actors can probe systems to find weaknesses and breach data.

Given how quickly the world is being connected by information systems large and small, Lyons said it’s difficult to imagine an area where data analytics can’t be applied.

“If we look at the crucial trend in the analysis of data and data analytics itself, [we see that]the trend is it’s everywhere,” he said.

Alex Keyes, FCLC ’16, and Peng Tang, GSAS ’16, interned last summer at Adept Technologies, where they designed, built, and tested robotics software in the mobile robots division.

“It was fantastic. We had a lot of autonomy,” said Keyes, who graduated from Fordham last month with a BS in computer science. “I realized the skills I have been cultivating at Fordham can directly translate to having a job—which is something you don’t necessarily experience if you don’t have an internship.”

Keyes and Tang landed the spots at Adept thanks to work they’d been doing in Fordham’s Robotics and Computer Vision Laboratory, directed by Damian Lyons, PhD, the interim chair of the computer and information science department and associate vice president for academic affairs at Fordham.

Detecting Danger

In the lab, Keyes and Tang worked on improving an algorithm that allows a team of mobile robots to communicate and navigate indoor space together, spreading out quickly to explore an unknown area.

Programs like these can be applied to search-and-rescue missions, Lyons said, when robots are sent in to locate victims and determine which areas are safe for first responders.

“It’s a very challenging problem, and we’ve addressed different parts of it at different times,” he said, adding that the lab has received some funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, to do similar work writing programs that allow robots to search for biohazards and weapons of mass destruction.

Lyons, who founded the lab in 2002, said working in robotics gives students several unique skills that are becoming more and more relevant.

“Cyberphysical systems are some of the most difficult types of systems to program, and this is exactly what robotics prepares you for,” he said. He also noted that with the increasing prevalence of robotics and cyberphysical systems comes a host of ethical issues that have yet to be worked out.

“You probably can’t buy an expensive car these days without it having a lot of robotic programming in it. … Eventually there won’t even be a steering wheel. But, of course, then who is at fault if that car causes an accident?” he asked.

“With the liberal arts and Jesuit educational background that Fordham provides, our students have a grounding not just in the technology but in the kinds of issues involved when the technology is deployed in society. I feel our students can be effective leaders in this area.”

Keyes and Tang were awarded the internships in spring 2015, when robotics technicians at Adept supervised the work the students were doing in the Fordham lab, which owns several of Adept’s robots for student research. Standing at about a foot and half tall, the bots move on four large all-terrain tires, and come equipped with programmable computers and various sensors that can measure distance. The Adept staff was impressed with the students’ work, and invited them to intern at the company’s research center in New Hampshire last summer.

Internship Supported by Science Council Alumnus

The relationship with Adept (now Omron Adept Technologies) —the largest U.S.-based manufacturer of industrial robots—was forged by Fordham alumnus Richard Juelis, FCRH ’70, an angel investor with a life science and technology background who sat on the company’s board for nine years. Adept provided living expenses and some of the funding for the internship, and Juelis provided the rest through a donation to Fordham.

“Any time you can do something hands-on in the industry, it’s great for students’ career development. When I was in school, there weren’t many internship opportunities, particularly in newer fields like robotics and computer science, ” said Juelis, who is a member of the Fordham Science Council—a group of alumni who support science education at the University. “And it’s a win-win, for Adept too, because they get interns who can help them develop new products.”

Juelis has sought to extend this type of exposure to younger students as well. “We also arranged for a visit to Fordham for students from my high school’s robotics program,” he said, “and hope to continue this in the future. ”

Real Responsibility, Relevant Experience

“Everyone has this idea of a software engineer as a very isolated thing—the nerd in the basement. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone there knew who Peng and I were, and they were very open to talking to us about what they were working on or things we were working on. They made sure we were having a rich experience,” he said. “We had a lot of responsibility.”

The experience at Adept—and in the Robotics and Computer Vision Lab—has provided both students with concrete skills they will take with them into the job market.

Tang—who earned an MS in computer science at Fordham—started work as a systems engineer at Comcast in Philadelphia this month, working with big data sets. Even though the position is not in robotics, he feels he can draw on skills that are transferable.

“There’s a lot of fundamental stuff that I learned in robotics that will definitely be helpful for my job,” said Tang. “A lot of knowledge in computer science is universal.”

Lyons said the relationship with Adept has been very valuable not only in providing students with concrete, hands-on experience but also in allowing them to envision a career in robotics.

“We’d love to see the internship continue,” he said.

So, why not send in a team of robots first to map out the area?

That concept recently inspired three Fordham undergraduates to develop a computer program that enhances autonomous exploration of disaster sites by robots. The students, Rose Hill senior Alina Kenealy and Lincoln Center juniors Nicholas Primiano and Alex Keyes, presented their findings in February at SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics conference.

Damian Lyons, Ph.D., associate professor of computer and information sciences, mentors the students.

The team worked on writing algorithms that would enable computerized robots to quickly disburse throughout a site and work independently, while still coordinating as a team.

“First responders have an extremely dangerous job,” said Lyons. “They are going into a disaster area and they don’t know what is out there. Our objective is to have this team of robots very quickly go out and map this area to see where’s the unstable masonry, where are the holes in the floor, where are the potential victims, where are the clear paths—and do it all within a matter of minutes.”

As the SPIE conference attracts many graduate students, faculty researchers, and members of the defense industry, Lyons said it was a significant accomplishment for undergraduate research to be accepted.

“But it is a commitment we have made here, to enable undergraduates to see the excitement of the field rather than just sitting in a classroom. They took the ball and ran with it, and produced some tremendous results.”