Tag: University of Vermont

How has the digital age transformed the meaning of connection? That’s one of the questions professor of Spanish and artist Tina Escaja explores with her work, challenging the boundaries that divide technology and humanity.

Here, Escaja discusses a recent project: writing poetry from the point of view of robots, called “Robopoem@s.” Hear the Robopoem@s and experience more of Escaja’s digital art. 

Escaja also serves as the director of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at UVM. In 2017, her book “Manual Destructivista/ Destructivist Manual” was named among the 10 best bilingual poetry books by Latino Book Review. 

About Faculty Feature:

What makes our faculty members tick? In this video series, get up close and personal with our professors. Hear them talk about their passions, their paths to UVM and why they love what they study, from the mysteries of Lake Champlain’s sculpin to the stories of homeless children in Pakistan. 

Source: UVM News

It’s equal parts critique, lesson and conversation as UVM student media adviser Chris Evans sits down with the Vermont Cynic’s editor-in-chief, Erika Lewy ’18, and managing editor, Olivia Bowman ’20, for their weekly review of the university’s student newspaper. Evans, who also advises WRUV radio and UVMtv, is well-prepared and rapid-fire, a teacher determined to maximize this hour on a quiet Friday morning in the Davis Center.

A chunk of the meeting is devoted to discussing leadership, driven by a reading list ranging from Lao Tzu to Machiavelli to Martin Luther King, Jr. Later, they drill down on a page-by-page look over the Nov. 7, 2017 Cynic, addressing questions as major as the choice of story on 1A and minor as stray commas. Evans offers opinions and advice on the myriad decisions that go into making a publication — why hyphens are forbidden in headlines, when is it editorially responsible to include “four-letter” words in copy, how to get Adobe InDesign to wrap text around that oddly shaped graphic, whether a rock-solid eight-page issue would be a better choice than a rough-around-the-edges twelve-pager, to name a few.  

There’s give-and-take. When Evans questions if a suspiciously wooden statement from a student presented as a spoken quote was, perhaps, actually an e-mail, Lewy pushes back, “No, that’s how this kid really talks!” Across the newsroom, another Cynic staffer gives her a second on that. Evans laughs and concedes.

As the editors and staff put together the next week’s issue, they’ll do it with Evans’ lessons and critique of past issues in mind, but with full control over the new editorial content and presentation. “That’s Chris’ thing — support, but from a distance — which is really good,” Bowman says.

Success across centuries

Today’s Cynic staffers are the latest in a proud legacy, “Vermont’s independent student voice since 1883.” The paper’s alumni include two-time Pulitzer winner Eric Lipton ’87 of The New York Times; Laura Bernardini ’95, CNN’s director of coverage in Washington, DC; and Robert Rosenthal ’70, longtime editor at top American papers and now executive director of the pioneering Center for Investigative Reporting; among scores of others in journalism and multiple fields.

Evans’ hire in 2006 introduced a new era for UVM student media. The organizations would be guided by a full-time adviser with deep expertise as a communicator. Evans’ work is informed by his own experience as a student journalist at the University of Kansas, five years as a newspaper reporter, Peace Corps service in China, and higher education media advising at Florida’s Valencia Community College. Long involved as a national leader in his field, Evans recently became president of the College Media Association.

The Cynic has earned numerous honors during the past decade, including prestigious Pacemaker Awards from the Associated Collegiate Press and “Diversity Story of the Year” in 2016 for an examination of UVM’s past Kake Walk tradition.   

Learning leadership

Fierce advocacy for First Amendment rights runs deep, a moral compass guiding Evans’ work. “I spend a lot of time working on leadership skills,” he says. “These are complex organizations, where students need to develop a vision for what they want the organization to be, then they need to figure out how to create that organization and nurture that organization. My students are 100 percent in control of their fate. I am an adviser, which means I give advice. They can follow it or not follow it, it’s up to them.”

Reflecting on the current political and cultural landscape, Evans says, “We need journalists now more than ever. There is more misinformation out there than ever. It is right to be concerned about the state of facts. That seems like a ridiculous statement to say, but we need to be concerned about the state of facts.”

At the Cynic, WRUV, UVMtv, and in the courses he teaches for UVM’s public communication major in Community Development and Applied Economics, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Evans counsels students interested in journalism/communications careers to be nimble and proactive.

Citing the success of recent alumnae Natalie DiBlasio ’11, director of social media at WIRED, and Aviva Loeb ’15, digital designer for emerging news products at the Washington Post, Evans says, “If there’s an organization that is on the verge of doing the thing that you are very excited about, that’s the time to jump in.”

He continues, “It takes creativity, which I think we’re good for here. We’re not creating a whole bunch of middle managers who are going to go out and sit at a desk and just be the hands of someone else’s mind. I think our students are going out, and they are the minds and the hearts of the organizations that they are working for. That’s what I want for them. I want them to be steering their own path. That’s what a journalist needs to do today.” 

Source: UVM News

Too little rain, or too much, is often a driver of poverty and hunger, leading to poor nutrition and food insecurity among vulnerable populations. According to a new University of Vermont study, rainfall patterns also provide clues on how to most effectively alleviate food insecurity.

The study, published November 24 in Scientific Reports, is the first to analyze on a large scale the relationship between food insecurity among smallholder farms in Africa and Asia, rainfall patterns and a range of interventions – from agricultural inputs to agricultural practices to financial supports – designed address the issue. 

Smallholder farms are small farms with limited resources that depend on the family for labor and on the operation’s crops for food or income. There are an estimated 460 to 500 million smallholder farms in the world, who grow 80 percent of the food consumed in low income countries. 

The study examined the experiences of nearly 2,000 smallholder farms in 12 countries in West Africa, East Africa and Asia. 

“The big picture is that one strategy is unlikely to work everywhere,” said Meredith Niles, a faculty member in the University of Vermont’s Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences and lead author of the study. “Understanding the climate context is important in determining what interventions may be most effective,” she said. 

Farms in the study were grouped into three categories: those that received less than average rainfall in a given year compared to the past, those that received average rainfall and those that received more than average. 

The drier farms experienced more food insecurity, an average of 3.81 months in the study year; the average farms less, 3.67 months, and the wetter farms still less, 2.86 months – as would be expected. But all experienced significant food insecurity. “The study reaffirms what we know: that food insecurity is a widespread problem in these areas,” Niles said. 

Cash or pesticides? It depends

Whether various interventions were correlated with better food security was statistically linked with the amount of rain the farms had received in the previous year, the study found. 

For farms with drier than average conditions, financial supports – cash from other businesses, loans or cash gifts – were more frequently correlated with improved food security. 

For wetter farms, agricultural inputs and practices – including the use of pesticides, fertilizer, veterinary medicines, and livestock – were most correlated with an increase in food security. 

For farms with average rainfall, both strategies appeared to be effective. 

“Water is a fundamentally limiting factor,” Niles said. “If you don’t have it, then agricultural inputs likely don’t matter. What you need, at least in the short term, is cash.”

The availability of fertilizer was the one constant that helped farms reduce food insecurity, regardless of the amount of rain they received, according to the study. 

Micro-financing: a cautionary tale

The study is both an endorsement of the micro-financing strategies that have been put in place to help farms in Africa and Asia and a cautionary tale that they might not universally be critical for smallholder farms experiencing food insecurity. 

“We don’t see an effect that financial strategies in wetter than average households make a difference in the short-term,” Niles said. “But these financial strategies seem to be especially important when drought or reduced rainfall impacts crop production and income sources.” 

Climate change increases importance of strategic intervention 

The issue of what works and what doesn’t is particularly significant because of climate change, said Niles. “The majority of smallholder farms rely on rain-fed agriculture, so they are vulnerable to climate change, which is slated to likely increase rainfall variability. Our work suggests that absent appropriate interventions, these future conditions may worsen food insecurity.” 

To reach its conclusions, the study cross analyzed two data sets. A smallholder farmer survey by the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) Program was coupled with 30 years of rainfall data for each household location in the survey using GPS coordinates. 

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

The study’s co-author is Molly E. Brown, a faculty member in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland. 

Source: UVM News

“When I was growing up in the Bronx, people thought I was crazy because I thought I could change the world,” laughs Rasheda Weaver, assistant professor of community entrepreneurship at UVM. Since then, Weaver has discovered a way to effect positive change, address social issues, and empower others to do the same: through business.

Watch as Weaver explains her interest in social enterprises, and why Vermont is the perfect place for these types of business to thrive.

Weaver’s dissertation was the first large-scale study in the U.S. of social enterprises. She’s currently developing the country’s first public directory of such businesses.

About Faculty Feature:

What makes our faculty members tick? In this video series, get up close and personal with our professors. Hear them talk about their passions, their paths to UVM and why they love what they study, from the mysteries of Lake Champlain’s sculpin to the stories of homeless children in Pakistan. 

Source: UVM News

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to preserve air and water quality “are really, at this point, in jeopardy,” said Gina McCarthy, who headed the agency under President Barack Obama and spoke Friday afternoon at the University of Vermont. “It is very, very difficult today not to get a little bit down.”

Still, everyone must stop worrying, buck up and move forward, she told those who attended the speech, sponsored by UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. That’s what her father would have demanded, McCarthy said.

“When I whined, he’d say, ‘Gina, pull up your big-girl pants and do something!’” McCarthy recounted in her unmistakable Boston accent. “So, I’m going to tell all of you to do exactly the same thing.”

Mincing no words and frequently jabbing a finger at the audience, McCarthy brought humor to descriptions of the bureaucratic machinations of government policy-making. Nancy Mathews, dean of the Rubenstein School, introduced McCarthy with hopes that the talk would provide “an opportunity to be inspired by what lies ahead.”

The current administration has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change and approved permits for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, despite environmental concerns. On Monday, President Donald Trump announced plans to cut the size of federally protected lands in Utah, including Bears Ears National Monument, to encourage development there.

The situation, though, isn’t as dire as some fear, McCarthy said. Many hard-won rules, including those of the 1990 Clean Air Act – which McCarthy called “the most significant public health law in the history of America” – took years of negotiation, legal work, scientific study and input by the public and cannot be unraveled without the same complex steps. A mere presidential announcement via executive order can’t do it, she said.

For the most successful government initiatives McCarthy oversaw, she said, leaders overcame partisanship and embraced different political perspectives. That remains even more important amid the current divisive landscape, she said.

President Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, started the National Park Service, she pointed out. Republican President Richard Nixon, with an executive order, created the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We can’t all of a sudden think that clean air and clean water or healthy land is somehow OK if you’re a Democrat but not if you’re a Republican,” she said. “There’s got to be ways that we connect with one another on our core values rather than the policies of what we’re talking about.”

Then again, on the topic of skepticism about climate change, often a partisan issue, McCarthy was unequivocal.

“Climate change is happening,” she said. “We have to stop debating the science.”

What worries McCarthy most, she said, is the apparent shift of current EPA leadership to give greater decision-making weight to lobbyists representing the chemical and energy industries than to the staff scientists who have spent their careers studying the areas regulated. During a question-and-answer session after the speech, McCarthy referenced some agency changes covered in a recent story by UVM alum and New York Times reporter Eric Lipton ’87, about a Trump Administration EPA deputy who is pushing to revise and weaken previously agreed regulations of toxic chemicals.

Now a professor at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, McCarthy said students constantly uplift her with their enthusiasm and commitment to social justice. Not only do they yearn to preserve natural resources, she said, but also to address unequal access to those resources within low-income and minority communities.

Grassroots action can make change, McCarthy said. In response to President Trump’s stance on the Paris Agreement, more than 300 mayors of U.S. cities have signed a pledge to continue to follow the accord. States first initiated controls on greenhouse gas emissions, leading to the federal initiative.

“It was only because it happened at other levels of government that we were able to make progress,” McCarthy said.

And, of course, individuals can vote. “We can make sure that we question our leaders when they deserve to be questioned.”

Source: UVM News

Mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn was on campus on Monday for a two-part gig.

At noon, he gave a public lecture at Ira Allen Chapel, titled “A Conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn,” presented and moderated by Jim Hudziak, chief of Child Psychiatry and director of the Vermont Center for Children, Youth, and Families at UVM’s Larner College of Medicine and the University of Vermont Medical Center. 

At 3:30, Kabat-Zinn was on more familiar turf: Carpenter Auditorium, where he delivered, for the second year in a row, a lecture on mindfulness for the Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies class.

Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies is the academic component of UVM’s Wellness Environment, a pioneering program launched three years ago by Hudziak that combines the neuroscience course with a residential experience. Students live in one of two substance-free WE residence halls, where they are incentivized to engage in a variety of healthy behaviors, from mindfulness to exercise to proper nutrition.

The WE program has grown from 120 students in 2015 to over 1,200 this year.

Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine emeritus and a creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is credited with bringing mindfulness to the mainstream over a forty-year career. He has published over a dozen books, including the landmark Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness.

“Let me say to students in the WE program how radical it is, how unusual for a university to have a program like this,” Kabat-Zinn told the 250-plus assembled students in Carpenter. “This is an alternative reality that honors the value of being present. Those of you in the WE program have made a commitment, before you step on campus, that we are going to do this mindfully. That’s extraordinary.”

In introducing Kabat-Zinn, Hudziak said that Full Catastrophe Living inspired him personally – the mindfulness pioneer later became Hudziak’s mentor – and was the foundation, with Kabat-Zinn’s other teachings, for WE’s emphasis on mindfulness. 

WE has been featured in a front page story in the Boston Globe, on CBS News, on NBCNews.com, on National Public Radio and in a national Associated Press story that appeared in outlets ranging from the Washington Post to U.S. News & World Report.  

Source: UVM News

On Friday, October 20, sharply dressed, a bit bleary eyed, a dozen UVM business majors meet at BTV airport for a 5:30 a.m. flight to New York’s JFK. A big day awaits. They’re the latest class to take part in what has become a rite of passage for many, a day when business students trade a UVM classroom for a Manhattan boardroom as their learning ground. It’s a critical element of BSAD 228, Wall Street Seminar, a course that gives undergrads in the Grossman School of Business experience in professional equity analysis and mergers and acquisitions. Launched in 2003 by professor emeritus James Gatti, it is now taught by Andrew Prevost, who holds the Elizabeth and David Daigle Professorship.

The short flight is a chance to grab sleep or gather thoughts. Queens to Manhattan, the mood is light on the subway. Students crack jokes, listen to a fellow passenger dropping rhymes to help pay his rent, peer at their laptops with one last run through presentation slides. The vibe turns decidedly more serious after they arrive at a Starbucks on 47^th and Broadway, where they nervously sip coffee before walking next door to Morgan Stanley, filing through security, then taking an elevator to a boardroom high above the city.

Awaiting them are UVM alumni Steve Penwell ’84, Morgan Stanley’s former director of equity research for North America, and Jamie Flicker ’89, managing director and partner at Greenhill & Co., LLC. After brisk greetings, it’s right to the business at hand. The twelve students in the 2017 Wall Street Seminar, divided into three groups, have spent the weeks leading up to this day at work on a financial projection model to determine the valuation of Goodyear Tire, Abbott Laboratories, and Corning, Inc., then advise investors whether to buy, sell, or hold stock.

Now, it’s time to step up.

The first group recommends buying stock in Goodyear, based in part on projected future growth. Penwell wants proof: “Sorry, I’m not very good at math,” he says. “What’s going to drive your revenue growth in 2018, ’19 and ’20? How did you get there, because I don’t understand the math? You’ve got five years of down revenue and you’ve got them up 2 percent in ’18. Why?”

The students say they are convinced there is pent up demand for certain types of tires. “That seems like a pretty key assumption without any data to support it,” Penwell responds.

“Admittedly, we are putting pretty far across the green per se” Matt Duff says.

“So you want us to putt, but with a blindfold on,” Penwell counters. “You are trying to convince us to put capital into this idea, right? Anyway, let’s move on.”

The questioning seems harsh, but it’s part of a grill-educate-praise routine that Penwell and Flicker have perfected. Flicker tends to play the role of good cop, telling one group, “Look, everything is there and you have a good argument to make. You’ve just got to make it verbally and then you’ve got to make it on a piece of paper.”

Reflecting on the exercise a few days later, Penwell notes that this year’s UVM students were among the best ever to present. “Clients are tough and can be belligerent. You are asking them to invest their money and commit capital,” he says. “I’m trying to impress on students that if you walk into a meeting with a client unprepared, they are going to rip you apart. So that’s part of the method to the madness when I evaluate their work. I’ve become more prescriptive lately, so if they don’t give me what I asked for I’m not afraid to give them some tough love.”

Across the fourteen years of the Wall Street Seminar’s existence, this investment world dry run, coupled with some tough love applied as needed, has been the linchpin of many students’ business education. Gatti says the benefits of the first trip to New York for students far exceeded his initial expectations. To this day, graduates of the seminar let him know how significant the experience was to their careers.

James Keller ’03, a portfolio manager with Tocqueville Asset Management, is among them. “Professor Gatti and the seminar were instrumental in my ability to land my first job,” he says. “I believe it’s a great differentiator for the business school for prospective finance students, giving undergrads the opportunity to be thrown into a real-life situation they might not get at other schools.” 

Keller’s father, James R. Keller ‘72, president of Green Mountain Business Consultants and chair of the UVM Foundation, has funded travel and other expenses associated with the seminar, inspired, to a large degree, by the experience of his son.

“In my opinion, this course was the defining element that put my son on his career path,” says Keller. “I waivered as a senior in my choice of what was to come next for me. I contrast that with James’s clear focus on getting to Wall Street and into the investment business. When something is that powerful, it needs to be funded, and in our family’s tradition of giving back to those enterprises or programs that shape us, let us grow and develop, we chose to fund this.”

A similar spirit drives the alumni who make the class possible through hosting the Wall Street visit and giving guest talks up in Burlington throughout the semester.

Penwell, a Wall Street warrior who cut his teeth on the trading floors of the 1980s, and Dave Daigle ’89, chair of the UVM Board of Trustees and partner at The Capital Group Companies, Inc., have donated their time and expertise since the seminar’s inception. “They stepped up early,” says Gatti of Penwell and Daigle, who recently funded an endowed scholarship in the professor’s name. “Almost all of the students in the seminar have gotten high level jobs before graduation, which I would attribute to what they learned from them.”

More recently, the course has expanded to include help from younger analysts and associates at Morgan Stanley. Patrick Halfmann ’14 gave a presentation at UVM on how to give a professional stock pitch. Evan Silberberg ’16 G’17 helped students build a fully functioning financial model before they started working with analysts. “I’m just returning the favor,” says Silberberg.

Someday soon, senior Kyle Hubschmitt may be joining them, but on October 20 he is ready for that same-day round flight trip back to Vermont. “I was nervous right up until we started presenting,” he says. “Once we started I was fine and was actually happy when he (Penwell) started asking us questions, because it gave us a chance to differentiate our work. It was a fun day. The elevator ride down after we presented felt really good. I can tell you that.”

Source: UVM News

Six University of Vermont students from the Community Development and Applied Economics program are featured in the new book Censored 2018: Press Freedoms in a “Post Truth” Society.

An annual anthology published by California-based media watchdog organization Project Censored, Censored 2018 compiles the top 25 student-written investigative news stories from the past year. The six UVM students — Clare Charlesworth, Audrey Tuck, Bridgette McShea, Olivia Jones, Emily von Weise and Kätchen McElwain — developed and submitted their stories as part of their spring 2017 class Journalism 2.0 with Community Development and Applied Economics (CDAE) professor Rob Williams.

Each year, a national panel of judges chooses 25 student written news stories to be included in the annual censored book. This year, students’ articles were selected from a pool of 350 entries from 12 different colleges. Stories written by University of Vermont CDAE students comprise nearly 25 percent of this year’s top 25 stories, a significant increase from the two UVM student written stories included in last year’s book.

Founded in 1976 by Dr. Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University, Project Censored “educates students and the public about the importance of a truly free press for democratic self-government … exposing and opposing news censorship and promoting independent investigative journalism, media literacy, and critical thinking.” Students in participating classes at universities across North America research and write “validated independent news stories (VINS)” that have “gone missing” from corporate news media coverage.

Student stories are submitted to Project Censored and most are posted on the Project Censored website. A national panel of judges chooses the top 25 stories to be published in the annual Censored book. Noam Chomsky calls the project “a crucial contribution to the hope for a more just and democratic society.”

Williams developed his class Journalism 2.0 around news, censorship, independent civic journalism and the “propaganda model of news,” developed by Edward Hermann and Noam Chomsky in the 1980s, a conceptual model often referred to in Censored books. “I’m incredibly proud of our hard-working CDAE students,” said Williams. “We will continue our CDAE partnership with Project Censored this coming spring in our Journalism 2.0 class.”

The six stories include McElwain’s “Voter Suppression in the 2015 Presidential Election”; Jones’ “Big Data and Dark Money behind the 2016 Election”; McShea’s “Antibiotic Resistant ‘Superbugs’ Threaten Health and Foundations of Modern Medicine”; Tuck’s “DNC Claims Right to Select Presidential Candidate”; von Weise’s “Ring-Wing Money Promotes Model Legislation to Restrict Free Speech on University Campuses”; and Charlesworth’s “Shell Understood Climate Change as Early as 1991 – and Ignored It.”

Censored 2018 is available through Amazon and at independent bookstores. 

Source: UVM News

One of the top ways to ruin a trade show, according to Entrepreneur Magazine: staff your booth with people who don’t understand all aspects of your product. There wasn’t a trace of that potential pitfall at a December 6 trade show in the lobby of Kalkin Hall, where students representing multiple majors pitched products as part of their Technology, Entrepreneurship and Commercialization course.

The interdisciplinary approach to the 200-level business course taught by Associate Professor Erik Monsen, the Steven Grossman Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, gave undergraduate business students a unique opportunity to work with graduate students in engineering, computer science and from the Larner College of Medicine to develop commercialization plans for new technologies created by UVM faculty and local entrepreneurs.

Business students discussed aspects of their products such as financial models, marketing plans, and sales, while engineering students focused on more technical features.

“It has been very helpful to hear different points of view and actually be able to communicate across different faculties, because one of the biggest barriers is actually communicating technology to someone who is not technology oriented,” said Kaiya Mallaburn, a business major whose team presented a ground-penetrating 3D radar system developed by engineering professors Dryver Huston and Tian Xia to help municipalities identify deteriorating infrastructure.

Tom Tailer, a member of the Vermont Haiti Project who has taught physics and engineering courses at UVM, devised a more environmentally sensitive method for producing charcoal in Haiti. His gasifier system has increased the rate that Haitians can produce charcoal – the main source of fuel in Haiti, which he expects to enhance with the addition of a press to produce charcoal briquettes.

“The UVM students have been very helpful with the business side and with improving the press and gasifier design as well as collecting more data on how to actually make the briquettes,” says Tailer, who is hoping to offer the Haiti Biochar Project through a women’s co-op in Haiti. “Like students said in their presentation, if it works in Haiti there are many other countries in the Philippines and Indonesia we could bring it to.”

Inventions designed to help people, turn profit 

Senior Maddie McCrae said she was impressed by Tailer’s commitment to helping people in Haiti as opposed to just turning a profit. “I think it’s really special with Tom because it goes so far beyond just creating this technology,” she said. “He has built a personal connection with the people by going back time and time again to the same community and doing more than one project because he cares about the ultimate goal of improving the community.”

Other inventions at the trade show included a blood test to screen for breast cancer risk that is less invasive than a biopsy; and a software system that uses machine learning and AI to automate the job and internship process to connect local businesses with students for internships, volunteering, and part-time jobs.

“We had a Ph.D. student create a start-up out of a past project,” said Monsen, a former aerospace engineer and entrepreneur who teaches a similar course in the Sustainable Innovation MBA program in collaboration with the Office of Technology Commercialization and SPARK-VT program. “He eventually got a great corporate job offer, which led to industry connections that brought money and student internship opportunities back to the university. We’ve also had students help researchers win grants, which they might not have been able to get without the market research conducted by students.”

Robert Rowland, a 1977 alumnus who is a patent attorney in Virginia, was invited to the trade show by Monsen to provide feedback and expertise on the patent process. 

“I was able to talk with students about intellectual property and patent research and what their thoughts were going forward in the patenting area,” said Rowland, who was in town to give a lecture at SPARK-VT. “From a marketing-communications point of view I thought the pitches were great, which is such an important part of the process. Clearly a lot of work had gone into each project. I think there is a lot of patentable subject matter here.”

Source: UVM News

Improving response to humanitarian crises. Holding politicians accountable for their voting records. Sorting “fake news” from real headlines. Today’s world offers no shortage of daunting challenges; last Friday, 354 students presented their solutions to these issues and more in the form of 187 websites, apps, and programs.

The Computer Science (CS) Fair, held every fall semester in the Davis Center, is a chance for Catamounts to show off everything from web design to sophisticated programming to in-depth research projects, and win up to $300 in prizes.

The fair isn’t made up of all CS majors or minors; some are students enrolled in their very first computer science course, like business administration sophomores Maddie Stoops and Maia Parker (below). Over the last semester, the two business analytics concentrators developed a program that delves into pay inequality in the U.S., an issue both students are curious about. It lets users see how education level, age, race, and profession impact wage. The class, says Parker, has been really valuable. “Coming out with programming knowledge is huge in today’s world. It really makes you think in a different way.”

 

Local pros from potential employers, including IBM, MyWebGrocer, and Logic Supply, stroll the ballroom with clipboards, judging the work. Tyler Van Ollefen with Union Mutual says seeing students in action is inspiring. “I like that there’s a bunch of people who clearly have a passion for what they’re doing.”

And for some students, those passions lie in other worlds, like junior Liv Jensen and sophomores Austin Viveiros and Beau Duval, who developed a website that allows visitors to create their own Star Wars character, and see how its attributes rank among peers. Beyond testing their knowledge of planets and weapons, the trio learned how to work like a true team, each finding their niche. “In a group, you have to change the way you think and match up your skills,” says Duval.

Other projects included an impressive, smart baby monitor by graduate students Anna Waldron and Viktoria Manukyan, developed in an advanced machine learning course to automatically detect a baby’s cry, laughter, and other sounds. And, there was sophomore Phillip Nguyen’s CNC router (he describes it as a “3-D printer in reverse,”) powered by a small, embedded computer that can be controlled remotely via Internet. The machine, which can cut wood, placed second among intermediate projects. “CNC routers are used in the manufacturing industry,” explains Nguyen, below. “They’re usually about three thousand dollars, but this was about two hundred dollars. I wanted it to be as affordable as possible.”

Learn more about the fair and see the full list of winning projects.

Source: UVM News