Aaron Beach Wins Ford Undergraduate Research Award

November 12, 2004

CS Undergrad Aaron Beach has won a Ford Undergraduate Research Award for work on a collaborative project, lead by Prof. Bustamante and Prof. Dick, on a car-to-car cooperative system.

Each year the Ford Motor Company awards up to twelve Ford Undergraduate Research Grants to sophomores and juniors for research with McCormick faculty members. Aaron Beach, a McCormick junior in the Computer Science Department, has been awarded one such grant to work on a collaborative project involving faculty from both the Computer Science (Prof. Fabián Bustamante) and the Electrical and Computer Engineering (Prof. Robert Dick) departments. This project will focus on the design of a self-organizing, wireless, car-to-car network for use in traffic routing and data exchange. It will allow traffic routes to be dynamically re-planned for such things as minimum time or maximum safety. These goals will be accomplished without reliance on a centralized infrastructure; instead cars will work collaboratively in a peer-to-peer fashion. Aaron will initially focus on implementing prototype devices for in-car computation and communication.