ORLANDO, Fla. - For the past three months, five teams of university students have been using their computer programming skills to deploy what they hope will be the winning robots in the Robotics Competition to be held as part of the 2007 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference. The Tapia 2007 Conference will take place October 14-17, 2007 in Orlando, Florida with the theme of "Passion in Computing - Diversity in Innovation."

Tapia 2007 is organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing and co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society, in cooperation with the Computing Research Association.

Although this is the fourth conference in the series, 2007 marks the first time the Robotics Competition will be held. Five teams of students representing four universities in the United States and Canada made the final cut and will send their robots out on simulated "search and rescue" missions at the conference.

The competition will be preceded by an invited talk on "Multi-Robot Intelligence" by Manuela Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Veloso is an internationally recognized expert in robotics and the winner of a number of robotics competitions. Veloso will be honored at the Tapia Celebration as the first Ken Kennedy Distinguished Lecturer, which recognizes outstanding research by an individual in a computing discipline.

The Tapia 2007 Robotics Competition is adapted from a class taught by Chad Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, in which students program robots to perform search-and-rescue types of tasks. Jenkins is co-chairing the competition with Jeff Forbes, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Duke University. Some of the teams will be using Create robots provided by iRobot, which makes small robots capable of carrying out a number of tasks.

"Because each team is starting with virtually the same hardware, the Robotics Competition comes down to being a test of programming skills, and how well the students can design an integrated robot system that can maneuver around a number of obstacles to reach certain objectives," said Prof. Jenkins.

- BamBotics from the University of Alabama, consisting of students Rachel Bystricky, Shameka Dawson, Quinton Alexander and Heather Freeman. Their faculty advisor is Monica Anderson.

- HMC Escher from Harvey Mudd College in California, consisting of students Vedika Khemani, Jessica Wen and Rachel Arce-Jaeger. Their faculty advisor is Zach Dodds.

- Nexus 6 from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, consisting of students Angelica Lim, Angelina Fabbro, Kate Tsoukalas and Lorin Beer. Their faculty advisor is Richard Vaughan.

- 42 from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, consisting of students Santi Santi, Adi Himawan, Agus Santoso and Nhan Nguyen. Their faculty advisor is Richard Vaughan.

- Team Tora from Auburn University in Alabama, consisting of students E. Vincent Cross II, Christin Hamilton, Caio Soares and Jerome McClendon. Their faculty advisor is Shaun Gittens.

In order to qualify for the competition in Orlando, the teams first had to use the Player software package to program a virtual robot to seek out objects in a simulated disaster environment. At the conference, the student teams will field robots equipped with a camera and touch sensors.

Each robot will autonomously search for and visit a number of marked but unknown locations (or "survivors") in a given environment. Upon identifying and reaching each survivor, a robot should make a simulated call for help.

More information about the Robotics Competition, and links to a number of resources, can be found at http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/tapia07/.

About the Tapia Conference Series

The Tapia conference series honors the significant contributions of Dr. Richard A. Tapia, University Professor and Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is internationally known for his research in computational and mathematical sciences and is a national leader in education and outreach programs. Tapia has authored or co-authored two books and more than 100 mathematical research papers. In addition to his academic positions, he is also Director of Rice's Center for Excellence and Equity in Education. This year's conference theme is "Passion in Computing, Diversity in Innovation."

The Tapia 2007 Conference enjoys the financial support of a number of academic, research and business organizations at several levels:

* Platinum Supporter: the National Science Foundation;

* Gold Supporters: AMD, The Empowering Leadership Alliance: Computing Scholars of Tomorrow, Google, Microsoft, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Princeton University and the Rice-Houston Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate;

* Silver Supporters: College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, Hewlett Packard, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University, the University of California, Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and USENIX;

* Bronze Supporters: Auburn University, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University, Harvey Mudd College, Indiana University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Center for Women and Information Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Department of Computer Science at Tufts University, and the University of Michigan.

* Contributors: IBM Research, iRobot, Northeastern University, Rochester Institute of Technology, the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the STARS Alliance and the University of South Florida.

For more information about the Tapia 2007 Conference, visit the Web site at http://www.richardtapia.org/2007/.
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