2004 News___________________________________________

December 22, 2004

The Jisan Research Institute is pleased to announce the opening of its second laboratory, located in Fullerton, CA. This is the first step in the expansion of the groundbreaking laboratory which places research in the hands of students.

The Jisan Research Institute was founded in 1995 by Dr. Sanza Kazadi, who was, at the time, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. The Institute, which at the time had only three students and ran out of Dr. Kazadi's apartment in Pasadena, CA., has since graduated fifty-seven students and has seventy three current students. Eight of the graduates have completed their undergraduate work. Of these, one is in Optometry School, four are in Medical School, One is in a Ph.D. program, and two have found places in industry.

The new branch in Fullerton is beginning with similarly humble circumstances, though it is strongly supported by the Pasadena Branch. Currently, the branch is housed in temporary quarters generously donated by families of two JRI students while a permanent location is sought. Like the Pasadena branch, the Fullerton branch has only three students, though this number is very likely to grow at an accelerated pace when compared to the initial branch's growth rate.

Unlike the initial JRI branch, the Fullerton branch boasts a sophisticated computer network which uses wireless technology and which can be easily moved from location to location. This wireless network allows JRI personnel to move into a space temporarily with a computer network that is identical to that available at any branch. Students are able to work on their research and prerequisite training even though the network can be put together and taken apart in a matter of minutes!

"We're very excited about this new JRI branch." says Dr. Kazadi, who is the current President of the Institute. "It is our intention to try to create research opportunities for the vast majority of American students seeking research or who are looking for careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. The creation of our second branch, however small, is a big step in this direction. If we are successful in building this branch, we are sure that we will be in a position to extend the service even further by creating more branches."

In the long run, the Institute hopes to combine high school level training with professional level research. The expectation is that students will be more interested in careers in science, mathematics, medicine, or engineering if they can participate in real research in these areas. While JRI is very young (it is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2005), it already has made progress in this area, and expects to continue to do so in the future!

During the last few months, while many students were at the beach surfing, in the malls shopping, or simply sleeping late, three area students were making history. These students, who have been carrying out research at a revolutionary research laboratory in Pasadena, CA called the Jisan Research Institute, were the first high school students ever to present in one of three different international scientific conferences. The conferences, which bring together scientists from all around the world, are events at which experts in various fields of research present work that they are doing at their universities to other scientists.

Edmund Lee (left) explains the main ideas behind his project to an interested scientist during the Poster Session.

For the students, this is no small achievement. One doesn't typically find high school students presenting at these types of conferences because all the work is new and cutting edge. This means that the presenters must describe work that nobody's done before and that is interesting and relevant to the people attending the conference. Since most high school students don't get an opportunity to work at the cutting edge, it's extremely unlikely for a high school student to be able to create a presentation that satisfies these constraints. Not only have these students had the honor of being the first students to publish in a particular conference, but they have had the opportunity to meet and mingle with scientists from around the world.

Emi Kondo explains how her swarm was constructed at the IASTED Robotics Conference in Waikiki.

The students come from three different schools in the San Gabriel Valley. Diana Jue is a senior at the Westridge Academy in Pasadena. Her project centered around the design of a system called a Fuzzy System capable of determining whether a sound that it is hearing is a tank or a truck. The system does this by using logical rules that resemble human thinking, and can deal with things that aren't well defined. Such things include the quality of a sound (sharpness, quality), beauty of a picture, taste of food, etc. The system that Diana presented (which she worked on with eight other students) allows soldiers on a battlefield to get accurate identification of vehicles producing sounds despite all of the noise one might find on the battle field.

Edmund Lee is a senior at Arcadia High School in Arcadia. His project centered around the description of swarm systems. Swarms are relatively new systems that have uses in a variety of areas including computation and robotics. Edmund is part of a research group trying to design and build robots capable of themselves building things. The hope is that a swarm (about 100-10000) robots will be capable of building structures of various designs when this research is completed. Uses of this research include construction in areas that are dangerous for people (such as the Chernobyl nuclear reactor site) or hard for people to reach (such as on the moon or deep under water). Edmund explored the design of clustering systems, which are primitive construction systems, and examined the optimal design of such systems.

Emi Kondo is a freshman at the University of California Santa Barbara. She graduated from San Marino High School in June of this year. Emi has been studying swarm engineering, working on a project independently from Mr. Lee. Her project, which was done with another student, examined the design of a swarm-based system designed as a stationary exploration swarm. Ms. Kondo's swarm of robots was capable of self-assembling into a line which subsequently swept out a circular search area looking for targets. What made this swarm interesting is that it was capable of repairing itself if any of its members malfunctioned, and that all agents were retained even when a failure caused the line to collapse. Ms. Kondo's project examined the minimal conditions for this to occur. Her work might make it possible for a variety of systems to be built including systems which allow robots to receive shipments from spacecraft which can drop off supplies in a general region, but not precisely.

Ms. Jue presented her work at the IEEE Conference on Fuzzy Systems held in Budapest, Hungary between July 25th, 2004 and July 29th, 2004. Mr. Lee i presented his work at the From Animals to Animats 2004 Conference held in Santa Monica, California between July 13th, 2004 and July 17th, 2004. Ms. Kondo presented her work at the IASTED International Conference on Robotic Systems and Applications 2004, held in Waikiki, Hawaii, between the dates of August 23rd, 2004 and August 25th, 2004.

You may think that science is extremely complicated, hard to understand, and virtually impossible to do. Scientists, many people believe, are really in their own world, dreaming up things that most of us consider too much to imagine. Years of work stand between the ordinary person and the scientist, and this gulf is so wide that few are ever able to cross it.

That's exactly what young James Yang used to think. "I thought it would take all of [my] high school and undergraduate [years] to get to research," he said. However, two years ago young James Yang joined a unique research lab in Pasadena, CA, which trains young people in the doing of science. "It only took about a year and a half until I started work on a project", he added about his work at the lab. During that time, James went through an accelerated program of research training. This training prepared him to join one of three research groups at the Jisan Research Institute. Once he joined the group, he spent a half a year getting familiar with the group's research, and started working with other students.

The laboratory, which is currently the only one of its kind anywhere, is located in Pasadena, CA. The Jisan Research Institute's mission includes involving young people in scientific research that is under way locally. Though the laboratory only has two full time scientists, it has active collaborations with two local universities (The California Institute of Technology and The University of Southern California). These collaborations not only provide support for thirteen of the Institute's sixty students, but also provide support for a graduate student who works with one of the research groups. This unique blend of seasoned scientists and young enthusiastic students has produced an especially prolific set of research results during the first half of 2004.

"All in all, we've had six papers published this year, and these papers were contributed to by twenty high school students", says the Institute's President, Dr. Sanza Kazadi. "This is both unprecedented in JRI history, and likely to be unprecedented in a number of other ways. Of the four conferences at which our work is going to be presented this year, I am guessing that three of them have never had a high school student present before." (The forth, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, an international scientific conference held in Seattle this year, had JRI student presenters in 2003 and 2000.)

Of the six papers that were or will shortly be published, one is a journal paper, to be published in the international scientific journal Complex Systems. This is an especially significant accomplishment for the students, as their work will be published alongside the very significant work of other scientists in the field. Typically, a student will publish a journal paper for the first time near the end of their graduate work. For these students, the early publication date translates to a head start of nearly a decade over their counterparts.

All twenty students carried out research in one of three areas. The first, fuzzy logic, consists of the design of systems that perform decisions much like human beings do. Data is represented using imprecise terms, such as "hot" and "cold" rather than 87.3 degrees celcius and 22 degrees celcius. The students specifically examined a system which determined whether or not an acoustic signal (sound) came from a tank or a truck; the system designed by the students was significantly simplified over a similar system produced by collaborators at the University of Southern California.

The second field is that of swarm engineering. Swarm engineering centers around the design of swarms of potentially simple things, like ants or simple robots or small computer programs. These things might have one simple task to carry out, which can be as simple as picking up objects scattered around and putting them down next to other objects. However, the whole group of them may have a single task to accomplish which is much larger than that of the individual robots. The students are designing virtual systems of simple robots whose eventual tasks will be construction tasks in which buildings, roads, bridges, energy devices, etc. may be able to be constructed. These efforts are parallel to those of JRI scientists who are currently developing the real robots.

Finally, the students examined topics in evolutionary design. This field examines the use of evolving computer systems in developing new electronic, mechanical, computational, etc. devices. The students' research is very basic in the sense that it is asking questions about what kind of things can be designed using this method, and how long it will take. It is hoped that this research will lead to computer systems completely capable of designing items, which will require the engineer to design only the evaluation mechanism while the software designs the new devices.

The students range in age from fifteen to eighteen and come from a variety of schools. These schools include Blair High School in Pasadena (Daniel Johnson), Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta (James Yang [15], KyuHong Min [17], and Brian Goo [17]), John Marshall High School in Los Angeles (Jhanisus Melendez [18]), Arcadia High School in Arcadia (Andrea Grosz [16], Dashiell Vitullo [18], Allen Cheng [15], Christine Seng [18], John Lee [17], Andy Bae [17], Andrew Lee [16], Edmund Lee [17], and David Choi [17]), North Hollywood High (Peter Lim [17]), Van Nuys High School (Anthony Lim [18]), San Marino High School (Emi Kondo [17] and Dharshan Chandramohan [16]), Westridge High School (Diana Jue [17]). One student (James Wigglesworth [18]) was home schooled.

"At present, all of the JRI graduates who have finished college are in a medical school, PhD program, or are doing some kind of research", said Dr. Kazadi. "We have very high expectations for these twenty students. Now we can be sure that they are capable of meeting them."

High school students Edmund Lee of Arcadia High School and Kyuhong Min of La Crescenta High School will be presenting work done with Research Mentor Dr. Sanza Kazadi on swarm engineering at the SAB'04 conference in Santa Monica, California on July 13th, 2004.

The two students worked in the area of swarm-mediated construction, an area of intense research at the Jisan Research Institute. Researchers expect to be able to deploy swarms of robots capable of constructing structures including buildings and dwellings using simple behaviors and multiple robots. The actions of each agent are independent of the others. All robots are autonomous, meaning that no person or central controller tells the robots what to do. The challenge for the researchers is to make swarms of robots that can act on their own, but carry out a specific expected task.

The two students have examined the effect of the mean free path of robot swarms on the formation of 'puck clusters', or groupings of simulated building material. This task is thought to be the simplest construction task possible, and so serves as a the benchmark for current distributed construction research. The swarm of simple simulated robots is dispersed in a predetermined area. The question for the students is how the mean free path, or distance each robot moves, on average, before interacting with another robot, affects the formation of clusters, if at all. The students found a correlation between the mean free path and the rate of cluster formation. This means that the density of robots does effect the cluster formation speed, though further investigation is needed before the students know if this is a causual relationship or coincidental relationship.

The students are very likely to be the only high school students presenting work at the SAB conference, where they will share the spotlight with scientists from around the world. The SAB'04 conference is an opportunity for scientists in the area of adaptive behavior and biomemtic engineering to share ideas and talk about the major research questions of the field. The students will have the opportunity to present alongside researchers who may be their professors in the upcoming years.

Kyuhong Min is planning to attend the University of California Los Angeles starting this fall, while Edmund Lee will be entering his senior year at Arcadia High School. Edmund hopes to study engineering when he enters college next year.

The Jisan Research Institute is pleased to announce a new partnership with Don Bosco Technical Institute, a Catholic high school located in Rosemead, CA. This partnership, called a Teaching Partnership, is meant to extend the capabilities of the Don Bosco Technical Institute to provide advanced computer science and mathematics classes on top of an already extensive and unique course set. As part of the Partnership, students from Don Bosco Technical Institute may attend mathematics and computers science courses at the Jisan Research Institute free of charge.

Dr. Sanza Kazadi, President of the Jisan Research Institute, called this "an important first step in bringing together the research and educational communities." Dr. Kazadi and colleagues believe that "in order for scientists to be doing their job right, they should be helping to bring more people into science. The most important part of helping someone become a scientist is helping her or him to find an opportunity to do science rather than to watch science be done from the outside."

Already three students have begun studying at the Jisan Research Institute as part of this program. These students are Chris Andrade, Shaun Cole, and Chris Hernandez. Their expected course completion time is the end of summer at which time they will earn credit for their classes by completing a final written for the classes they are studying. Once this is completed, the students will receive equivalent credit to that they would have received if they'd taken the class at school.

"Hopefully, programs like this will help students to catch up with their overseas counterparts," says Kazadi. "We've been losing ground against other countries for some time now. Perhaps this program will help us gain some back."

Three students from Los Angeles County schools will be flying to Seattle later this month to report the results of their research in the field of Evolutionary Computation. The students, who have been working with Dr. Sanza Kazadi on a novel system called Directed Exhaustive Search, will present their work to scientists at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2004), which will take place from June 26-30th. At the Conference, the students will give a talk to a group of between twenty and forty scientists.

The students, each of whom has been working at the Jisan Research Institute for more than one and a half years, come from three different schools. Daniel Johnson is a Junior at Blair High School in Pasadena. Jhanisus Melendez is a Senior at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. Brian Goo is a Senior at Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta. As part of their work at the Jisan Research Institute, all students learned computer programming and theoretical mathematics before joining their research group.

The new system represents a cutting edge development in Evolutionary Computation. This system is an exhaustive system based on evolutionary systems which provably includes all the benefits of an evolutionary system while avoiding some of its weaknesses. The paper explores the computational equivalence between this system and all evolutionary systems, and makes predictions about the performance of a genetic algorithm (a particular evolutionary system) which are validated by numerical experimentation.

This is the first research paper for all three students. All students are currently planning to continue their work, either in college or at JRI.

Nine high school students from Los Angeles County high schools have been invited to the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems to present work that they have done in designing a fuzzy system which identifies vehicle types based on their acoustic signature. The student were notified via email on March 25th that their paper, entitled Open Analysis of Genetic Algorithm-Generated Fuzzy Rule Sets, had been reviewed by a panel of scientists and accepted to the conference. As a result, the students will attend the conference, which is been held in Budapest, Hungary between July 25th and July 30th of this year. At the conference, one or more students will present their work before an international group of experts in fuzzy logic.

The students are part of a group of students working at the Jisan Research Institute (JRI) in collaboration with Mr. Taehoon Shin, graduate student at the University of Southern California, and Dr. Sanza Kazadi, Director of JRI. The work is part of a collaboration between the laboratories of Professor Jerry Mendel of the University of Southern California (USC) and Dr. Kazadi, made possible by a grant though the Integrated media Systems Center, a National Science Foundations- funded Engineering Research Center. The students work together primarily with Mr. Shin on problems that are related to work already under way which allow the identification of ground vehicles (trucks, tanks, etc) base on their sound. The nine students come from Arcadia High School, Cresenta Valley High School, North Hollywood High School , San Marino High School, and Westridge High School and range in age from 15 through 18. The team consist of two girls and seven boys. The team is lead by Diana Jue, a Junior at Westridge High School, who is expected to deliver the team's presentation in Budapest.

The Jisan Research Institute is a one-of-a-kind Institution which introduces students to science by attaching them to cutting-edge research on a variety of topics. Students need not have experiences or advanced classes to begin. The program walks students through all stages, allowing students with initially little or no background to become experts in their field. All students are expected to contribute to work which lead to publication in their field.