Poster session showcases CS and Engineering research

The Dartmouth Innovation and Technology Festival marked the dedication and formal inauguration of our new premises, the Class of 1982 Engineering and Computer Science building. It was also a way to celebrate all the amazing work already being carried out by its occupants.

On Friday, May 13, the building welcomed visitors for a tour of research labs and maker spaces. A well-attended and interactive poster session put the spotlight on the high-impact research that graduate students, post-docs, staff, and faculty are doing in the CS and Engineering departments. A total of 75 posters were presented and a committee of judges selected three winners each in CS and Engineering categories. There was also a grand prize for overall best poster, which went to a team from the CS Department.

"Standing out in academia is already difficult, and there is a lot of great research happening in CS and Thayer," says Charles Carver, Guarini '22, who presented the winning poster on Sunflower, a first-of-its-kind system that senses underwater robots from the air. The work was done with Qijia Shao (primay co-author), Guarini '23, Samuel Lensgraf, Guarini '23, Amy Sniffen, Guarini '23, Maxine Perroni-Scharf '21, Hunter Gallant, Guarini '22, CS assistant professor Alberto Quattrini Li and CS professor Xia Zhou. 

"With research being done behind closed doors, it's always hard to gauge how well my work will be received by a general audience," says Eammon Littler, Guarini '22, whose poster with co-authors and CS faculty, Bo Zhu and Wojciech Jarosz, won the first prize in the CS category.

Their work explores a low-cost approach to multi-color 3D printing. Littler recounts that one of the judges snapped a filament sample that was colored using their custom-made device. Luckily, this only helped reinforce the case they were making for creating devices that render multiple colors rather than investing in many single-color ones that may need frequent replacement.

Kate Salesin, Guarini '23, enjoyed interacting with visitors and fielding questions at different levels of expertise. She presented work on an ongoing project to equip ordinary digital cameras with low-cost filters that will enable them to "see" all wavelengths of visible light, beyond the typical RGB. Salesin and co-authors Dario Seyb, Guarini '23, Sarah Friday, Guarini '26, and Wojciech Jarosz placed second in the CS category.

"After working on a project for a while, it is easy to feel bogged down in its day-to-day challenges," says Salesin. "It was invigorating to see people with fresh eyes on the project be impressed by its successes."

The third prize went to Samuel Lensgraf, Guarini '23, and his collaborators Amy Sniffen, Guarini '23, and CS faculty Alberto Quattrini Li and Devin Balkcom. Lensgraf, who presented preliminary results on an autonomous underwater system which dry stacks cement blocks, was excited to discover overlap with work being done by Thayer researchers.