Advanced Technologies Department
Students Presentation Wins First Prize

Undergraduate student project
poster presentation by Advanced Technologies Department students
Donald T. Carter and Sidney M. Blankenship (supervised by faculty
Ognjen Kuljaca, PhD, and Pritpal Dang) has won first prize at 7th
Annual HBCU-UP research conference poster competition in Computer
Science and Information Systems section. The conference was held on
February 9-12, 2006 at Bowie State University, Maryland. The poster
was presented by Mr. Donald Carter. The student research on this
project was supported by Alcorn State University HBCU-UP grant funds
and Alcorn State Foundation.
"There were about seven
hundred students from different areas of research, like Mathematics,
Chemistry, Biology, and Engineering. It was good experience because
I got to see what students at other Universities were doing in a way
of research," said Carter. "Also first place winners were offered
acceptance to graduate school on the spot."
It all started last
summer when Carter and Blankenship had a chance to learn about
programming of robots during their internship.
"My colleague Donald
Carter and I had an interesting internship this past summer where we
went to the Nissan Plant in Canton, MS, and created a network and
put robots at the plant on that network, said Blankenship. "In the
process we learned the robotic software which is the software that
is used to run the robots there at the plant. With the knowledge we
received from the experience at Nissan, future plans are to continue
work with Nissan in teaching robotics software at Vicksburg campus
of Alcorn and to continue research in Networking and Robotics
together. My plans after graduation are to attend graduate school
here at Alcorn in the field of computer science and also to attend a
technology camp to further my education in computer networking."
Alcorn State family
is proud of Mr. Carter and Mr. Blankenship and wishes them success
in their future endeavors.