Our heartiest congratulations to Dr. Yu on successfully defending! Dr. Yu’s research focused on model order reduction techniques for large scale systems, you may find her publications here. Dr. Yu will continue her research at the EDP Lab.

Lab Member Saurav Agarwal has been selected as one of the winners of the 2015 Roberto Padovani Scholarship for being one of the best performing interns at Qualcomm. The Roberto Padovani Scholarship was created in 2008 to recognize Qualcomm’s corporate research and development interns who demonstrate technical superiority during summer internships. The scholarship is named for Roberto Padovani, who was Qualcomm’s chief technical officer for almost a decade and who was a leading innovator of the company.

Candidates for the scholarship are nominated by their mentors or managers at the end of the internship. The nomination then must receive support from Directors and VPs after which the VPs in the organization meet and select the recipients from the pool of candidates.

Saurav’s research at Qualcomm was in the area of Simultaneous Mapping and Planning for Aerial Robots using Vision Based Sensing. His efforts focused on developing algorithms and implementing them on real hardware using Qualcomm technology to create the next generation of autonomous UAVs.

During his internship at Qualcomm, Saurav and his mentor (EDPL Graduate Dr. Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi) filed 6 inventions for the new technology they created. They hope to demonstrate the results of their research in the coming months.

The 8 recipients of this year’s scholarship each receive a $5,000 academic scholarship. If a student chooses to come back as a second-year intern or as an employee in the future, then he or she is eligible to receive a generous return bonus.