Imagine a day when canopies of solar panels across campus generate enough electricity to meet all of Mason’s power needs. That’s the dream of seven senior engineering students and faculty advisor Liling Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).
It’s not often that college students have a chance to solve cybersecurity challenges, delve into data mining, and take a salsa dancing lesson over the same weekend. But those who attended PatriotHacks, Mason’s second annual collegiate hackathon, did just that at the MIX@Fenwick, October 18 to 20.
When Mason Engineering professor Cameron Nowzari was an undergraduate, all he wanted to do was design and build robots. He was especially interested in the idea of swarm robotics, in which large teams of robots are designed to cooperatively complete tasks that a single device might not be able to do alone.