Undergraduate student receives best poster presentation at national workshop

November 18, 2022

By Sarah Small

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Third-year electrical engineering undergraduate student Michael Artlip received the Best Poster Presentation Award at the eighth National Workshop for Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Research in Network and Systems. The workshop was held Oct. 22 in Denver.

Artlip, along with fourth-year computer science and engineering undergraduate student Owen Sweeny, received support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) REU program to work in Penn State Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Bin Li’s lab this past summer. The NSF REU support was a supplemental grant for Li’s NSF project, Foundations and Scalable Algorithms for Personalized and Collaborative Virtual Reality Over Wireless Networks. In addition to a summer stipend for their research, both students received a travel stipend to attend the October workshop and present their work, which was the first published academic conference paper for each student.

Artlip received the award for his poster presentation on his paper, Virtual Reality-Based Gymnastics Visualization Using Real-Time Motion Capture Suit. Artlip was the first author, and Li and electrical engineering doctoral student Jiangong Chen were the paper’s co-authors. The paper details the team’s development of a system that uses virtual reality to allow gymnasts to control a virtual gymnast from the first-person perspective. The system’s virtual gymnastics animations are derived directly from moves performed in real life using a motion capture suit.

Sweeny’s paper, on which he was the first author, was titled A Collaborative Augmented Reality Platform for Interactive and Immersive Education. Li and electrical engineering master’s student Zhanchen Dong were the paper’s co-authors.