Edison Academy student wins second place at MIT engineering conference

Edison Academy student wins second place at MIT engineering conference

A student at the Middlesex County Academy for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies in Edison presented a paper at an engineering conference at MIT and came home with second prize.

Poojit Hegde, a junior in electrical/computer engineering from Monroe, and his co-author, Avi Cooper, a senior at Torah Academy of Bergen County, presented their paper at the 2016 MIT IEEE Undergraduate Research Technology Conference. Titled “An Indoor Positioning System Facilitated by Computer Vision,” it was awarded second among 36 papers, all but two by college students.

“The conference was extremely exciting, and I got to meet undergraduates, graduates, professors, and professionals from across the country and even across the world,” Poojit said. “They were all really shocked to hear I was a high school student. There was only one other project by a high school student, and he was an international student.”

Poojit and Avi did research for their paper over the summer at WINLAB, a computer science lab at Rutgers University, through the Liberty Science Center Partners in Science Program.

The research paper will be published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in its Xplore Digital Library.

11/22/16