2002 News___________________________________________

January 2002

JRI scientist Dr. Sanza Kazadi will be leading a group of high school students to a conference in Italy to present work the five completed over the past few months. The five will present a poster at the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Conference. The five authors of the poster include four high school students, currently attending high schools in the immediate area. Amos Zhang, a senior and the student head of the group, attends South Pasadena High School in South Pasadena. Amos will attend the California Institute of Technology next year, where he hopes to continue his work on robotics and engineering. Brian Lee and Ryan Cho are juniors at Arcadia High School, and Michael Chung is a sophmore at Arcadia High School. All five will fly to Bologna, Italy where they will attend the conference and present their results to scientists working on similar research.
The work is a first step in the development of distributed construction systems, according to Kazadi. In the paper, the five describe methods of regulating the formation of "clusters", or collections of building material assembled by robots with little sensory capability and no memory. Using such robots enables scientists to create large "swarms" of robots for little cost, but requires them to learn how to obtain complex behavior despite the limited behavior of the individual robots. "The groups of robots need to be built in such a way that they can accurately build up collections of objects of a specific size in order to allow the groups to build precise structures with predefined dimensions." explains Kazadi. "Once we can do this, we can start thinking about moving these groups of building material to specific locations, and generating rudimentary two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures."
This paper is part of an ongoing research effort at the Jisan Research Institute in which methods of creating large groups of robots can be generated which will allow the groups of robots to build structures. Such work might lead to realistic technologies that would allow the construction of useful structures undersea, in remote areas, and on nearby moons, planets, and asteroids. Dr. Kazadi began this research as a graduate student at Caltech, and now it is a mainstay of JRI.
The paper may be obtained from the Swarm Engineering Website .

April 2002

As part of its continuing growth, the Jisan Research Institute has expanded into a second facility. The new facility, located at 26 North Oak Avenue, is 2200 square feet in size, effectively doubling the space available to JRI students and staff. This expansion marks the second increase in space in as many years, and is possible due to the growth of the Institute over the past year.
26 North Oak Avenue is located directly below the facility at 28 North Oak Avenue. Together, the two fill a two-story building. This makes it possible to separate, for the first time, the teaching labs from the research labs. Over the next several months, JRI will separate into two disparate areas. On the lower level, beginning students will work in teaching laboratories and classrooms. On the upper level, more advanced students will work alongside scientists in working laboratories.

May 2002

For the second year, the Jisan Research Institute is proud to offer a Summer Research Training Program. The program is intended to provide students with a firm introduction into the art of doing science. The program provides an exceptionally focused and complete introduction to the life of a scientist by coupling students with active research teams, and incorporating them into the work the research team is doing. As with the previous year, participants in the program will be able to complete work that will become part of a pending research report. Such a contribution will make it possible for student to become contributors to the scientific knowledge of the greater scientific community. In the case of exceptionally significant contributions, participants in this program will be included as authors on these research reports, making them part of the scientific community in a way that will continue to aid them in their scientific career for years to come. The Summer Research Training Program will take place between June 17th and August 19th of 2002. Students are expected to come to JRI between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, though it is possible to reschedule the times to accommodate summer activities such as summer school, etc. The program is open to any high school student or recent graduate interested in science. Twenty spots are available this summer, on a first-come first-served basis. The cost of the program is $600.00.

December 2002

For the third consecutive year, the Center for Neuromorphic Engineering , a National Science Foundation funded Engineering Research Center has provided funding for the Jisan Research Institute in the form of fellowship money meant to support financially disadvantaged students. The fellowships, which total $3000.00 each, provide one year of funding for five students. All five spots have been filled by students from John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, California and Blair High School in Pasadena, California. The students currently supported by the Caltech Fellowships are Gabriella Escalante, Carina Garcia, Jhanisus Melendez, Valerie Munoz, and Amauri Villegas.