KU engineering students win student paper contest

LAWRENCE -- Travis Plummer, University of Kansas senior in electrical engineering from Baxter Springs, and Bharath Parthasarathy, KU senior in electrical engineering from Madurai, India, won first prize in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Region 5 student paper contest on Saturday, April 20, in Houston.

The IEEE Region 5 conference included participants from universities in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and portions of Illinois, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota and New Mexico. The first-place award carries with it an $800 cash prize. The paper will be published in a book to be distributed to IEEE student chapters and libraries around the world.

The KU students developed a radar target simulator for testing and calibrating a wideband radar used by the Remote Sensing Laboratory to map near-surface internal layers in the Greenland ice sheet. Plummer and Parthasarathy wrote a paper based on their work and made a presentation at the Region 5 2002 Technical Conference, Leadership Conference and Student Contests April 19 to 21.

The simulator project enables researchers to validate the accuracy of sensitive radar equipment before taking it to Greenland for a NASA-funded study of polar ice and its relation to global climate change.

"It mimics all the things we'd see in the field," Plummer said of the simulator.

Their effort is important because so much rides on the equipment's ability to provide accurate results before it is taken abroad, Parthasarathy added. The radar itself cannot be tested in the United States because the frequency would create interference for cellular phones and other types of essential communications devices. On the other hand, it is too expensive for the research team simply to travel to Greenland to test the radar equipment every time a modification is made. The successful simulator project saves both time and money, the two students said.

Parthasarathy works on the Greenland research project as an undergraduate research assistant, and Plummer took part in the work as a honors project. The students were guided in their efforts by Prasad Gogineni, Deane E. Ackers distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science. The work was carried out at the Remote Sensing Laboratory of KU's Information and Telecommunication Technology Center.

Both students credited Gogineni for motivating them to prepare the paper and keeping them on track. In addition, the research experience itself has been rewarding, they said.

Plummer said the best aspect of the project was "just being able to take all the theory you learn in the classroom and being able to apply it in the lab -- finding out what works and what doesn't."

Parthasarathy found it inspiring to see the level of effort and planning that goes into a project the size of the Greenland Ice Project.