FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                           RELEASE NO. 41-08

CADETS WIN 8TH IEEE DESIGN COMPETITION -- May 13, 2008

WEST POINT, N.Y. -- Seniors Patrick Bryan, Joe Krick, Scott Lobdell and Ben Smith competed and won first place at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s 8th annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Student Design Competition held May 3 in Rochester, N.Y., for their innovative system for device-independent control of robots through the Internet.

Team WebBot, consisting of electrical engineering and computer science majors, competed against 13 other teams from schools to include RIT, Syracuse University, RMC, the University of Massachusetts and Dartmouth.

Safety -- for both robots and people around them -- turned out to be the hard part of the problem.  Everyone knows Internet connections can suffer delays and cut-outs.  The trick for the WebBot team was to proof their system to prevent robots from falling down stairs, running into walls or bumping into people during such an Internet glitch.

An honorable mention award for most marketable project went to senior Mike Kranch and junior Roy Ragsdale of Team HAL-Xen.  They devised a clever way to monitor any activity of a client computer with absolutely no detectable trace of the eavesdropper.

In addition to revealing a rather scary information security “back door” that assurance professionals will need to watch, the technique has obvious applications for system configuration analysis and management.

The RIT IEEE annual Student Design Contest invites students in accredited engineering schools to showcase their senior level, undergraduate design projects.  Projects are evaluated by judges experienced in the field of engineering and six awards are given based on specific criteria.

The student design contest is a great way to obtain feedback from industry professionals as well as gain promotion of design projects and connectivity to other engineers.