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Four CSE Student Organizations participated in the USF Engineering Expo
Four CSE student organizations participated in the annual USF Engineering Expo. Engineering Expo showcases the work of STEM student organizations, corporate partners, and community partners. Engineering Expo provides educational and interactive demonstrations for peers, community members, and students in K-12 grades. Cub scouts can even get a merit badge for attending. Engineering EXPO is a free USF and Tampa Bay community event.
WOMEN IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (WICSE)
“At the Engineering Expo, we did a coding activity similar to a MadLibs game, where students chose the words, the code created a story, and a speaker read it to them.” Felicia Drysdale, (CS, WiCSE President). At the table, you could catch a glimpse of their program between the shoulders of gathered, giggling middle schoolers. “We've had many girls come up to our table, and they were pretty intrigued about the program and how it works. I hope this makes them interested in tech!” said Maanasa Poluparti (CS, WiCSE Secretary).
WiCSE, or Women in Computer Science and Engineering, is for female students who are majoring or interested in any engineering-related field to provide support, career guidance, and relevant opportunities.
“Special thanks to our Expo Chair, Alex Cannon, for writing the code,” said Felicia.
ROBOBULLS
RoboBulls is for students who have a passion for robotics. Members have participated in national and international competitions, such as RoboCup. “I was contracted by USF to develop these for a class,” said Chance Hamilton (Treasurer), waving at the robots, “and our club uses them for competitions. We used to apply AI to soccer, but the codebase was very hard to learn. So I rewrote it in Python, and now we do the MicroMouse competition.”
MicroMouse has students create a robot that autonomously maps and navigates a maze. These competitions provide a common testing ground where scientific advances can be studied and evaluated under real-time conditions.
SOCIETY OF COMPETITIVE PROGRAMMERS (SCP)
“We focus on preparing people for competitive programming competitions and technical interviews,” said Ali Aslanbayli (President), “But today we did something different. This is an AI Bot that detects your dance movements.”
At the table was a monitor showing a library of tiktok videos. Ali introduced me to Otabek Abduraufov, (Expo Co-Chair), the developer, who immediately asked me to try the program. “It compares 18 points on the body and compares them to the ones in the video,” said Otabek “It uses cosine similarities, so depending on the angle of your bones it’ll show the similarity percentage. It took us about three months overall.”
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INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS COMPUTER SOCIETY (IEEE-CS)
“We finished it a few days ago,” Zachary Menchel (Physics), “It took us about three months,” he added, showing me their translation station. The small black box translates morse code into a digital readout.
“After getting the electronics done, we 3D printed the housing,” Jacob Hansen (Computer Engineering), as someone started typing out their name.
The IEEE Society is a dynamic platform for members to learn, network, and collaborate about computer science and engineering. Their mentor program allows students to work and learn with someone more advanced in the field.
“We put our heads together, we had a problem we wanted to solve, and we were in there working day and night,” said Alex Lee (IEEE Mentor), as he showed me how the box would open to show the insides.