Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Program (LSAMP) held their first meeting of the semester in the South Dining Hall Feb. 12.
The meeting was led by Dr. Melanie Martin, Associate Professor for the department of Computer Science, and was a great way to welcome back Science and Math scholars as well as get reacquainted with peers and professors.
Dr. Martin laid out some upcoming events, talked about financial assistants, wanted to know who was graduating and she also talked about beginning research for entrance to graduate school.
Four students already began their research in the Fall and shared what they have been working on during the meeting.
The first participant was senior Brandon Halpin who conducted research on “Autonomous Quadcopter Flight,” funded by Central Valley Math and Science Alliance (CVMSA). The main purpose is to control any communication and intercept it through this technology. To have this technology, Halpin is trying to figure out more about the MAVProxy- since it is the center of all the control. This Autonomous Quadcopter can also help in agriculture to help determine crops well being. Some future work he mentioned was environmental awareness, obstacle detection and surveying.
Guadalupe Calvillo was the second participant.  With the help of Silvia Klein, a student, and Dr. Elvin Aleman, her research was “Photophysical Characterization of free Base Corrole and Solvent Effect.”  The main concept here is to understand porphyrins and corroles; they are tetrapriollic molecules and by using the UN-Visible spectra 15 they are efficient at absorbing light. Future work for Calvillo and associates is continuing to study the UN-V’s spectra.
Next was “Synthesis of Subedamine A” by Carol Cervas. This can act as a poison from other pray, it could be an antibiotic if they synthesize it and it can possibly help treat cancer. When using this during research, Cervas made it clear the solvents must be carefully removed from the chemistry flasks or the research could be destroyed.
Last was “Topic Segmentation and Text Coherence Detection in Wikipedia Using Latent Semantic Analysis” by Martin Torress; advised by Dr. Martin. This research allows quick parsing of HTML documents. Torress started with a matrix when creating a semantic space in which 300 dimensions are for matrix decomposition. LSA abstract words from the number build behind websites and is used for search engines and social networking. Information retrieval is what this was originally used for.
All of this interesting, informative research from LSAMP students was presented with free pizza and refreshments.