The Daily Bulletin

Gary Hu, assistant professor and student research mentor in the Computer Information Systems (CIS) Department, took three of his students—Eric Barton, YongJun “Frank” Lee, and Anthony Puleo—to Albany, New York, to compete in the student programming and undergraduate research competitions at the 28th annual conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Northeast Region, held at the College of Saint Rose on April 12 and 13.

This competition included computer science (CS) and CIS students from 32 colleges and universities from across the northeastern United States. Most students in the competition came from CS programs, which are typically more rigorous theoretically and mathematically than CIS programs, including students from the following well-known universities:

• University of Massachusetts (Amherst, Massachusetts)—a Research I institution and the largest public research university in New England;
• University of New Haven (West Haven, Connecticut)—a private university that was recently named the Top-Tier Comprehensive University in the North by U.S. News & World Report;
• University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)—a Research I institution that has been ranked No. 3 among public universities nationally by U.S. News & World Report and has consistently ranked among the best universities in the world.

In the programming competition, Buffalo State placed 13th out of 20 teams from 14 schools.

In the undergraduate research competition, Buffalo State placed first out of 46 teams from 25 schools. In announcing the results of this competition, the conference organizer said, “This project has attracted a lot of attention… The winner clearly is SUNY Buffalo State.”

The title of the students’ research is “AI Enhanced Autonomous Navigation: Integrating GPT-4 Processing and LiDAR in Robotics.” Watch a brief visual description of the research and the competition results.

It is worth noting that the project was developed from scratch, including both hardware and software. All software source code was developed by the students, under the direction of Dr. Hu, with no code coming from any existing packages such as online Python, C#, or Linux scripts. The robotic hardware was built from scratch with some assistance generously provided by Jon Rosten of Buffalo State’s Engineering Technology Department.

It is also worth noting that since the beginning, this research project has been generously supported by Buffalo State’s Undergraduate Research Office, particularly the Early Undergraduate Research Opportunity (EURO) and Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship (USRF) programs.

The students’ efforts and results in this competition have shown that Buffalo State CIS students can compete at the highest levels, and that—with sufficient instruction, resources, support, and motivation—they can succeed in whatever endeavors they undertake in the future, big or small.