CIS Intern Wins Six Awards at High School Science Fairs

Jerrod Sutton, a senior at Mountain Brook High School, recently won six awards at the Alabama State Science and Engineering fair (Huntsville) and the Central Alabama Regional Science fair (Birmingham).

Jerrod received the following awards at the state science fair:

• Intel Excellence in Computer Science (state level)
• U.S. Army Science and Engineering Award
• 3rd place in Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science division

At the regional level, Jerrod received the following awards:

• Herbert Hoover Young Engineer Award
• Intel Excellence in Computer Science (regional level)
• 2nd place in the Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science division

Since August 2005, Jerrod has been working with Assistant Professor Jeff Gray on a robotics project. The internship was arranged through a collaboration initiated with Margaret Clark of MBHS.

Jerrod has been adopted as an official SoftCom lab member, and visits the lab three times a week (between 7-10 hours per week). Jerrod's internship in the CIS department has provided an opportunity for him to investigate a Lego Mindstorm's robot that is capable of character recognition. Jerrod's robot can recognize blocks of black alphabet letters that are placed on a white background. The recognized letters are displayed on the LCD panel of the robot.

In Fall 2006, Jerrod will be a freshmen at UAB in the CIS department.

A scientific poster highlighting Jerrod's research can be found at:

http://www.cis.uab.edu/gray/Pubs/jerrod-sutton.pdf