A research project initiated and developed by Avi Cooper, TABC ‘17, and Poojit Hegde, Middlesex County Academy of Edison High School ‘18, won second place at an MIT undergraduate engineering conference last weekend. The paper, “An Indoor Positioning System Facilitated by Computer Vision,” was researched at WINLAB, a Computer Science Lab at Rutgers University in North Brunswick this past summer through the Liberty Science Center Partners in Science Program.

Of the 36 papers accepted for the 2016 MIT IEEE Undergraduate Research Technology Conference, six were selected by the conference organizers and MIT department chair to be anonymized and sent to Boston area professional IEEE members for judging. Winners were announced over the weekend at MIT. Although Avi missed the oral presentation which took place on Shabbat, he did receive special permission to showcase a poster of the work at a Sunday poster session, highlighting a novel approach to indoor positioning using cameras. All papers, including Avi and Poojit’s, will be published in IEEE’s scientific journal, IEEE Xplore.

Avi and Poojit’s paper placed second for best written paper. There was only one other high school paper submitted, as this conference was composed of mostly undergraduate students. Many people didn’t even realize how young Avi actually is, even confusing him for a graduate student based on his submission. A sponsor mentioned that Avi and Poojit had done research similar to a current PhD student at MIT who had recently been awarded a lab position at the MIT Media Lab. TABC is proud of Avi and his accomplishments.