A senior at Cooper Union majoring in electrical engineering, Torah Academy of Bergen County graduate Eli Friedman was a recipient of the Howard Flagg Memorial prize at The Cooper Union. This is a brand-new prize honoring excellence in the field of electrical engineering research created in honor of Howard Flagg. Mr. Flagg was a 1975 Cooper graduate in electrical engineering and former trustee who passed away in 2009.

Friedman works on a project with Cooper’s Associate Dean Anita Raja, analyzing an algorithm first derived by her and former students at UNC-Charlotte. It measures decision making in networks made up of nodes that are not all connected to each other.

“I’m analyzing this algorithm to find out how long, on average, it will take before everyone agrees on the same thing,” he said. “The hypothesis is that it will work very well for certain types of networks, like scale-free networks where a few nodes are very well connected, but most nodes are not.”

In the summer of 2015, Friedman traveled to Bar Ilan University in Israel as part of Cooper’s study abroad program. There he worked in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Lab to participate in a national competition to program an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to autonomously fly through an obstacle course.

“We developed an algorithm for the hexacopter to detect and avoid obstacles while flying towards its goal,” he said. Friedman’s team was awarded first place in the competition.

“I hope that the prize will promote further research among Cooper students,” Friedman continued.

Friedman’s Flagg Prize funds will further his senior project research, a collaborative undertaking with mechanical engineering students. The students are building an autonomous snowplow, which will be able to clear snow from a homeowner’s walkway. Before a snowfall, the homeowner will manually drive the robot along the path that he wants to be snow free. The robot will then autonomously follow that path, keeping the sidewalk clear of snow.