Five CS&E Graduates Receive Runner Up Award at CCAT Competition
Department of Computer Science & Engineering Graduate students Nitin Varyani, Jason Carpenter, Steven Sleder, Wei Ye, and Rostand A. K. Fezeu, as well as their research associate mentor Eman Ramadan earned the runner-up award from the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT) student poster competition at the University of Michigan on May 22nd. Their poster focuses on downstream data and improving autonomous vehicles’ ability to detect bicyclists, traffic cones, and small items by compressing data to easily detect these objects and avoid accidents.
“There are sensors attached to the vehicles such as cameras, LiDARs, and other sensors like GPS,” said Ramadan. “They generate different types of data that we need to send to a remote driving center. The human driver at such centers is going to look into this data, look over the vehicle, and take some actions to control the vehicle when required. The main challenge here is how fast the remote driver can see everything in real-time as the vehicle drives. If there is any significant delay, the remote driver may not detect an object (e.g., another car, human, traffic cones, etc.) and could get into an accident. We research different compression techniques to apply instead of sending the raw data to minimize the latency as much as we can.”
Moving forward, their research aims to expand on live video compression by focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) task distribution among onboard, edge, and remote systems to apply efficient AI technical models. They are currently testing different techniques that work with 5G data to have data efficiently sent to autonomous vehicles and data centers.
“I would like to thank our supervisor/Advisor Zhi-Li Zhang for pushing us toward cutting-edge research problems and avenues to tackle,” said Ramadan. “He is always keeping us up-to-date with new research directions/challenges offered by the National Science Foundation (NSF), we are trying to solve and provide practical solutions. Thanks to him, we have multiple grants from NSF which help us provide research assistants (PhD and MS students) and all the hardware and software tools we need for our research. Last but not least, this couldn't have been done without the hard work of all the students in our lab, especially Nitin Varyani, Jason Carpenter, Rostand A. K. Fezeu, Wei Ye, and Steven Sleder”.