Local Youths Invited to Present Research

Seven high school students from around the Los Angeles area have been invited to present their research to an international audience of scientists at two different scientific conferences to be held later this year.

The students, ages 16, 17 and 18, have completed sophisticated research projects and generated new scientific results because of work they've been doing for about a year at the Jisan Research Institute in Pasadena.

Local youths include Crescenta Valley High School students Ryan Chang and Justin Huang.

All seven students did work at Jisan Research Institute. The institute involves young people in cutting-edge scientific research that is under way at the lab. The laboratory has two full-time scientists, and it has had active collaborations with the California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California.

These collaborations not only provided support for 13 of the Institute's 60 students, but also provided support for a graduate student who worked with one of the research groups. This blend of seasoned scientists and students has produced an especially prolific set of research results during the first half of 2005.

Crescenta Valley High students Ryan Chang and Justin Huang and Edmund Lee of Arcadia High School, examined the application of a new formal swarm-generating technique developed at the Jisan Research Institute. Their project involved building a group of robots which would spontaneously organize themselves into multiple equal-length lines even though each robot did not know how many other robots there are in the group. One mechanism took the students six months to build and perfect, and the second took five minutes to formulate once the theory had been completed. This method promises to make it possible to design swarms of increasing complexity. The young men will present their results at the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics conference this fall in Hawaii.