Summer Students Support Smart Connected Systems Research in NIST’s SURF and SHIP Programs

Every summer, NIST hosts summer students in its Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program and Summer High School Intern Program (SHIP) to work in areas that support its mission. NIST seeks to inspire students to serve in these fields. During their summer internships, students are exposed to cutting edge research areas and NIST researchers benefit from their fresh perspectives and thinking. This year, the following SURF and SHIP students researched and presented on projects in NIST’s Smart Connected Systems Division: Andrew Oxenberg, Ben Winig, Nicolas Carbone, Kevin Song, Tyler Wong, and Nathan Wei (SURF) and Derek Hu (SHIP).

The Division’s Smart Connected Manufacturing Systems group hosted Andrew, Ben, Nico, and Kevin, who worked with their NIST mentors on several different activities. Andrew developed file isolation and dependency mapping to enhance the usability of navigation and visualization of dependencies using easyEXPRESS, a NIST-developed tool supporting use of STEP standards for the exchange of product data. Ben focused on creating data management foundations for a simulated manufacturing environment using SimPROCESD, a NIST-developed open-source tool for modeling and simulating discrete manufacturing systems. In addition, Kevin worked on developing a new graphical data analysis tool for SimPROCESD, and Nico focused on collecting and analyzing data from a collaborative robotic manufacturing testbed.

In the Division’s Internet of Things (IoT) Devices and Infrastructures group, Tyler focused on software development for IoT device interoperability analysis, including creating a tool to test data collected directly from IoT device communication. In the Division’s Networked Control Systems group, Nathan worked in the Industrial Wireless Systems project on supporting User Datagram Protocol (UDP) communications for a real-time control robotic application involving a leader and follower robot that communicate over wireless. Nathan also had the honor of being selected as one of the plenary speakers at the SURF Colloquium. As a SHIP student in the Division’s Transformational Networks and Services group, Derek learned concepts in machine learning (ML) and federated learning (FL) and the use of Python/Tensorflow for ML applications, and he experimented with server learning schedules for improving FL performance.

More information on NIST’s SURF and SHIP programs and how to participate can be found online at https://www.nist.gov/surf and https://www.nist.gov/iaao/academic-affairs-office/high-school-students-ship.