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Meet student researchers advancing AI, manufacturing and more

by | Nov 13, 2024 | Features, Research

Arick Nitzsche (left), a manufacturing engineering junior in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, works with Xiangfan Chen (right), an assistant professor of manufacturing engineering in the Fulton Schools, to improve 3D printing techniques for complicated designs using multiple materials. As part of the Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative, Nitzsche is one of many students helping to solve real-world problems through use-inspired research. Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

This article is part two of a two-part series highlighting student researchers presenting at the Fall 2024 Fulton Forge Student Research Expo on Monday, Nov. 18. Read part one. Learn more about the expo.

Enhancing software engineering education, developing new artificial intelligence models for cybersecurity, improving semiconductor material performance, advancing additive manufacturing capabilities and better understanding soft robotics control are just some of the ways Arizona State University students are addressing real-world challenges through hands-on research.

Undergraduate and graduate students in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU have several opportunities to conduct research that has real-world impact. Through individual projects mentored by Fulton Schools faculty members, students apply their classroom knowledge, build new skills and forge meaningful advances in the research themes of data science, education, energy, health, security, semiconductor manufacturing and sustainability.

In the Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative, also known as FURI, and the Master’s Opportunity for Research in Engineering, or MORE, programs, participants conceptualize ideas, develop plans and investigate research questions during a semester.

Students participating in the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, or GCSP, can apply for additional funding to conduct research through the GCSP research stipend program. Conducting research is one part of the rigorous GCSP competency requirements designed to prepare students to solve the world’s most complex societal challenges.

These three programs enhance students’ ability to innovate, think independently and solve problems in their communities. They also benefit from the technical and soft skills they gain, which prepare them for their careers and the pursuit of advanced degrees.

Each semester, students who participate in FURI, MORE and the GCSP research stipend program are invited to present their findings at the Fulton Forge Student Research Expo. Learn more about five of the researchers participating in the fall 2024 event.

Meet them and more than 115 other student investigators at the Fall 2024 Fulton Forge Student Research Expo, which is open to the public, on Monday, Nov. 18, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Memorial Union on the ASU Tempe campus.

ASU engineering faculty mentor Ruben Acuna and MORE student researcher Devanshi Tushar Prajapati.

Ruben Acuna (left) and Devanshi Tushar Prajapati (right). Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

Devanshi Tushar Prajapati

After earning an undergraduate degree in information communication technology, Devanshi Tushar Prajapati was looking for a more specific direction to take her graduate studies. As a software engineering graduate student, she found an opportunity to use her skills to help improve programming education through MORE. With her mentor, Ruben Acuna, an assistant teaching professor of software engineering, Prajapati is developing a code analysis method to help instructors better teach programming skills.

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What made you want to get involved in MORE?

I had been looking to do a research project that would give me more exposure than just a final presentation. MORE gives the opportunity to present your project on a bigger stage. Exposure is important because it allows me to share my work with a wider audience. This can lead to valuable feedback and potential collaborations in the future.

How will your research project impact the world?

My project is concentrated on improving teaching methods for software engineers. The impact will be better course structures and methods to make learning software engineering easier. I noticed that many students struggle with certain programming concepts. Our work aims to identify these problem areas. This could lead to more effective learning and better-prepared software engineers entering the workforce and industrial offices.

Have there been any surprises in your research?

Yes, I didn’t expect to draft an Institutional Review Board proposal, but it was a unique process that was fun to learn. An IRB proposal is required for research involving human subjects, and we needed one because our project involves analyzing student data. The process taught me about ethical considerations in research and how to protect participants’ rights.

How do you see this experience helping with your career goals?

The career I am looking forward to is in data science, which is what I am doing my research in. Data science is important because it helps us make sense of the vast amounts of information we generate daily. It has applications in many fields, from health care to finance. I’m interested in working in industry research, where I can apply data science to solve real-world problems.

Along with that, I am sure meeting new people with similar goals will help me advance and gain more knowledge about my field.

What is the best advice you’ve gotten from your faculty mentor?

No dataset is worthless. No matter how small a dataset is, there is always some inference you can gain from it. For example, in our project, even a small sample of student code submissions revealed common patterns in how students approach certain programming tasks. This insight helped us identify areas where additional instruction might be beneficial. The most interesting thing we discovered in the dataset so far is that error types — like “Indentation,” “NeedBraces” and “WhitespaceAround” — appear frequently across all modules, suggesting these are common challenges for students.

Learn more about Devanshi Tushar Prajapati’s fall 2024 MORE project.

ASU engineering FURI student Alexander Ng and Stefan Stealey-Euchner.

Alexander Ng (left) and student researcher Stefan Stealey-Euchner (right). Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

Alexander Ng

Alexander Ng is interested in computer security and using automation to make tasks easier. Combining these interests, the computer science senior is working on research to advance artificial intelligence, or AI, capabilities in security contexts. With faculty mentor Stephanie Forrest, a professor of computer science and engineering, Ng’s FURI research project involves creating an AI model that generates understandable code. Working under the theory that you can’t secure what you can’t understand, Ng seeks to create explainable models better suited for cybersecurity-related tasks.

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What made you want to get involved in FURI, and why did you choose the project you’re working on?

I had a project idea I wanted to research, and this program gave me the opportunity to develop it. I’ve long been interested in evolutionary algorithms, and have seen great use of neuro-evolutionary techniques in handling reinforcement learning tasks.

I’ve also been watching the recent trends in artificial intelligence and was dismayed to see that while the scale of models balloons toward higher complexity, our understanding of it lags farther and farther behind; we do not understand the machines we’ve created. This limits its applicability in another area of interest: cybersecurity.

In critical and security infrastructure, we must limit our use of AI-driven agents to those we actually understand. Bugs in code can be fixed, but bugs in a machine learning model with millions of parameters under fuzzy edge conditions are troublesome, to say the least. But what if our AI agents could be the code itself? This is the idea I’ve sought to explore: using genetic programming with neuro-evolutionary techniques to create more interpretable agents. 

How will your research project impact the world?

We’re building this with applicability in mind. Plenty of academic projects with great ideas die out without being adopted into actual usage, oftentimes simply due to implementation choices. We chose a format of a widely adopted, modern technology, WebAssembly, and are developing it in a performant and popular language called Rust.

Hopefully, we validate our hypothesis and can demonstrate the power behind our proposed model. If it works, then given a problem with a well-defined fitness function, we have the potential to generate agents to handle arbitrary problems across numerous domains. For instance, in the space of antivirus and intrusion detection, instead of purely hand-crafting filters or using an opaque neural net, one would be able to use this method to generate an agent that could scan one’s system for malicious patterns. Programmers could then fine-tune the model as code.

Have there been any surprises in your research?

Exploratory research is full of surprises. You try something, and it doesn’t do as well as you’d hoped. You try something else that you’d written off, and it does way better. You don’t know until you try, and that’s the interesting part!

What is the best advice you’ve gotten from your faculty mentor?

Start small; fail early. Validate the ideas that work, filter out the ones that don’t and iterate.

I have a tendency to become overambitious and try to optimize prematurely, but in reality, research is done best when experiments can be quick to yield results. The quick turnaround allows you to hone in on a successful idea and know what direction to go. Knowing when to build things to last versus building things quickly is a great skill to learn.

Why should other students get involved in FURI?

If you’re interested in doing research, then join a lab and get your feet wet. Many professors — or even grad students — have ideas they don’t have time to commit to researching themselves but would be happy to mentor you in exploring. If you have a specific idea you can pitch, even better! It’s a great experience.

Learn more about Alexander Ng’s fall 2024 FURI project.

ASU engineering FURI student researcher Daniel Abreu and faculty mentor Nick Rolston.

Daniel Abreu (left) and Nick Rolston (right). Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

Daniel Abreu

Electrical engineering senior Daniel Abreu was interested in expanding his skills outside his major’s typical curriculum and learning something practical, so he joined the FURI program. Under the guidance of Nick Rolston, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, Abreu is looking for a new way to interpret and understand material diffusion — a factor in the aging process of semiconductor devices. His project, which he has been working on since spring 2024, is sponsored by the semiconductor foundry TSMC. Sponsorship provides additional funding for undergraduate students to conduct exceptional semiconductor-related research.

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Why did you choose the project you’re working on?

I have always been curious about semiconductor materials, especially since that has been the buzzword for the past decade, and even more so in the past two years or so. Materials classes are fairly far into the electrical engineering degree, so this program was a great way to get some early experience that I wouldn’t have normally gotten so soon.

How will your research project impact the world?

I want to see if there is a new way to characterize aging in semiconductor materials that hasn’t been used yet. Hopefully, this will aid in finding new perspectives to take into account when manufacturing semiconductor materials.

Have there been any surprises in your research?

Last semester, when trying to find relationships in material diffusion, some results were a bit unusual compared to other research projects. The plots are supposed to be largely linear and are used to help calculate donor densities throughout a material. This semester we are taking strenuous measures to make sure that discrepancies due to human error aren’t present and instead trying to narrow down and see if the discrepancy is due to the materials or the aging process.

How do you see this experience helping with your career or advanced degree goals?

The practical experience this program has given me has been a good talking point with recruiters when looking for internships. At a recent career fair, some recruiters have asked me about my experience in this research so it was nice being able to talk about the ins and outs of this project and what I learned from it.

What is the best advice you’ve gotten from your faculty mentor?

The best advice I have gotten from my mentor is to always be flexible when performing research. For example, going into an experiment, we might have a preconceived notion of how results should look, but we might get results that are unexpected. In these situations, my mentor reminds me to look at the research from a different angle or remove preconceived notions to consider something that may not have been taken into account going into an experiment.

Why should other students get involved in FURI?

I think other students should get involved with this program because it allows undergrads to better connect with professors, PhD students and other fellow students as well. I think it’s also a great way to get some practical experience that might not otherwise be offered in a traditional class.

Learn more about Daniel Abreu’s fall 2024 FURI project.

ASU engineering FURI student researcher Arick Nitzche works in the lab.

Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

Arick Nitzsche

Arick Nitzsche likes studying manufacturing engineering because it’s all about continuous improvement, making things run efficiently and ensuring cost-effectiveness. As a junior, he got involved in the FURI program to work on research that aligns with his interests. With faculty mentor Xiangfan Chen, an assistant professor of manufacturing engineering, Nitzsche’s project aims to improve the process of 3D printing complicated shapes while also using multiple types of materials.

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What made you want to get involved in FURI, and why did you choose the project you’re working on?

I wanted to get involved in this program because it allowed me to do things as an undergraduate student that most others are not able to do. I wanted to be able to do real and meaningful research in a lab.

I chose the project I am working on because additive manufacturing is a fascinating topic to me. The more I learn about 3D printing the more I realize how versatile 3D printing is.

How will your research project impact the world?

My engineering research project will impact the world by speeding up 3D printing and allowing for the creation of more complex objects made from different materials at once. This could lead to better technology in areas like medical devices, smartphones and semiconductors. Overall, 3D printing can be applied to any field to find new creative ways to implement technology. For example, 3D printing little robots using a flexible material with very small magnets inside of it allows for noninvasive surgery to occur on patients using magnetic fields that would otherwise be invasive.

Have there been any surprises in your research?

There have definitely been some surprises in my research. The project I am working on is a lot more complicated than I realized at the beginning. However, I do not think that is a bad thing. Before this I was oblivious to how many fields could be improved using 3D printing and the vast amount of materials that could be used to create various products or machines.

How do you see this experience helping with your career or advanced degree goals?

This experience will help me with my career as I have learned a lot more about the field I am interested in. I have been able to get my foot in the door and get some insights into how the industry functions. I have also learned more basic skills and encountered new machines and tools I never knew existed before I entered the FURI program.

Why should other students get involved in FURI?

I think other students should get involved in this program because it opens up your world to future opportunities. By joining FURI you are setting yourself up for success. Not only are you doing that but you can get hands-on experience in a topic you are interested in with the financial support you need to get real answers to the problem at hand. Overall, it’s a great experience that will give you more than you could ask for.

Learn more about Arick Nitzsche’s fall 2024 FURI project.

ASU engineering FURI researcher Raj Kodithyala and faculty mentor Wenlong Zhang work on robotics research.

Wenlong Zhang (left) and Raj Kodithyala (right). Photographer: Erika Gronek/ASU

Raj Kodithyala

Raj Kodithyala, a senior in the robotics concentration of the engineering major, has always loved the field of robotics and wanted to pursue research when he joined ASU. As part of the FURI program, he is working on better understanding and predicting how a soft robotic arm moves with faculty mentor Wenlong Zhang, an associate professor of manufacturing engineering.

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What made you want to get involved in FURI, and why did you choose the project you’re working on?

I wanted to explore new opportunities in the robotics world and understand what research work is like. I chose my project because I get to learn, explore new software and design tools, and apply my previous skills to a project with future impact.

How will your research project impact the world?

This research aims to improve human-robot interactions by making robotic systems more predictable, reliable and safe. By focusing on soft robotic manipulators, which offer more flexibility and adaptability than rigid robots, the project seeks to reduce the risks of injury and improve the robots’ ability to operate in dynamic environments.

Did you have a particular “aha!” moment during your project?

I didn’t necessarily have a big “aha!” moment since my project is cumulative over time. I had a series of “aha!” moments when I discovered why a certain electrical component couldn’t be wired this way, how to eliminate a huge code redundancy or a critical step I missed in the modeling approach. I learned how to troubleshoot systematically through an iterative approach.

Have there been any surprises in your research?

In my project, I found that using simple, linear models to represent a complex, nonlinear system is more challenging than expected because nonlinear systems don’t respond proportionally to inputs. This required breaking the system down into smaller, simpler parts to better understand its behavior. By tackling the problem step-by-step, I could make progress without being overwhelmed by the complexity.

How do you see this experience helping with your career or advanced degree goals?

This experience has provided valuable exposure to industry and research tools, including motion capture software and Robot Operating System 2, or ROS 2. Additionally, I have developed proficiency in MATLAB for data post-processing using various advanced toolboxes. These skills will be highly applicable in future roles focused on automation, robotics and system control.

What is the best advice you’ve gotten from your faculty mentor?

It is OK to start small for now and go big later. Don’t jump around without a concrete plan and expect results.

Why should other students get involved in FURI?

FURI gives students the chance to explore fields they might not have experience in, helping them discover new interests and develop useful skills. It also builds adaptability and problem-solving abilities that are valuable for research and future jobs.

Learn more about Raj Kodithyala’s fall 2024 FURI project.

About The Author

Monique Clement

Monique Clement is a lead communications specialist for the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. She earned her BA in journalism from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. For seven years before joining the Fulton Schools communications team, she worked as an editor and journalist in engineering trade media covering the embedded systems industry. Media contact: [email protected] | 480-727-1958 | Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

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