BRL researcher Kevin Huang hosts Early Engineering Institute students

EEIThe Early Engineering Institute is a free program for residential 9th and 10th graders. The program engages these students in math and science related fields and helps prepare students for college and college applications. We hosted a short-term mini-research project involving basic programming and introduction to haptic enabled technologies. The students also had the opportunity to interact with haptic devices and demonstrations in the biorobotics lab.

BRL Hosts UW Summer Math Academy Students

Kevin_MathAcademy_2015For the second year in a row, Kevin Huang of the BRL has been helping with the UW Math Academy Summer Program. The Math Academy offers a free summer program to help Washington State high school students develop key math, engineering and problem solving skills. The program targets specifically underrepresented minorities. As part of the program, students participate in a three-day workshop, called a Focus Group. For this, Kevin has been a teacher and mentor in a small-scale design project focusing on basic information about haptics and haptic enabled systems. By the end of the program, the students receive a crash-course in the mechanisms by which humans sense touch, design an experiment to interrogate a person’s two-point threshold, and also learn to program a one degree-of-freedom haptic device. The students work to acquire key skills, such as experimental design, analysis, programming and teamwork skills necessary to succeed in engineering related fields. Read more about the UW Math Academy here. MathAcademy_2015

Bainbridge Highschool students tour the BRL

Bainbridge Highschool students from the school’s biomedical engineering club toured the BioRobotics Lab!

The students discussed brain-computer interface security with Tamara Bonaci, deep brain stimulation with Jeffrey Herron, haptic interfaces with Kevin Huang, and surgical robots with Danying Hu.

BioRobotics Lab demonstrates research technologies at the IEEE Seattle 110th Anniversary Celebration

SeattleIEEE110_JAHThis last Sunday evening, members of the UW BRL attended the IEEE Seattle Section’s 110th Anniversary Celebration event at the Seattle Pacific Center. Senator Maria Cantwell joined regional IEEE members to celebrate this impressive anniversary. Graduate student researchers Jeffrey Herron and Kevin Huang brought demos to the event to showcase ongoing research from the UW BioRobotics Lab.

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BRL hosts UW Math Academy Focus Group

The BioRobotics Lab ran a 3-day workshop for highschool Math Academy students. This workshop introduced haptic enabled systems and allowed the students to program and experiment with haptic devices.

Infinity Box brings BCI security to the stage

cropped-IBX-type-6Five researchers affiliated with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, including our very own Howard Chizeck, teamed up with local Seattle playwrights to create a series of short plays exploring new advancements in neural engineering. While collaborating with Howard, Roger Tang wrote “Truth and Lies” to explore themes present in our work into BCI privacy concerns. The series of short plays will be shown June 13-15 at the Ethnic Cultural Theatre in Seattle. More at InfinityBox.org

Raven II makes an appearance in Ender’s Game

Raven@EndersGame

The Raven II robot of UW EE’s BioRobotics Lab has been in the spotlight on many occasions, from fulfilling an 11 year old’s wish experience through the Make-a-Wish Foundation, to becoming the first open-source platform for surgical robotics research for seven universities across the country. But Hollywood? More at UW EE