News
School of Computing Students Abigail Diller and Marc Tunnell Awarded Kindschi Fellowships
April 08, 2022
Two School of Computing students have had the honor of receiving a Kindschi Fellow this Winter 2022 semester to continue research with computing faculty. The Kindschi Fellowship is a competitive fellowship specifically for undergraduate students to continue research within the sciences. It is an honor to receive.
Abbey Diller will be continuing ongoing research with Dr. Erik Fredericks with their fellowship. Abbey notes that this project started over one year ago with the Michigan Space Grant Consortium and they are happy to see it continuing into this next semester. The goal of the research project is to investigate power consumption in cyber physical dimensions. Specifically, the goal is to discover what will influence increase or decrease power consumption within these controlled spaces.
Abbey’s setup includes an Arduino, a Raspberry Pi, sensors, and a small solar panel. They hope to eventually find a way to decrease power consumption with their small model so that this can eventually be applied to the real world. An example they gave were this would be relevant is when companies are performing test runs on projects which consume a lot of energy such as testing for a rocket launch or testing self-driving cars. If they were to find a way to reduce this consumption, it would make a large impact environmentally, allow for as much testing as possible where it may have been reduced previously, and may allow for longer testing times.
Abbey notes that they wish more undergraduate students would become involved in research, as they find the community collaborative and supportive and the work rewarding.
Marc Tunnell is our second Kindschi Fellow recipient who will be performing research with Dr. Nate Bowman and Dr. Erin Carrier. Marc will be conducting research on the NASA Ames Global Climate Model (GMC.) This is a tool that has been used to model the climate on Mars, and is most famously known for studying the Dust Cycle, CO2 Cycle, and Water Cycle. It has just recently been released to the public for use and study.
This model is extremely complex, and the run time to produce a single model can take upwards of two days to produce. Ultimately, each run is potentially non-perfect, and is therefore run many times to compile multiple data sets. Marc’s work will be to create a surrogate model intended to perform the same functions, but at a fraction of the time; minutes compared to days. If he is successful, it could influence the work of future studies in this field.
The School of Computing is proud to have our faculty members mentoring students who are successfully obtaining these prestigious fellowships.