NSF Award
2441747
This grant provides support for broadening student participation at the 2024 Modeling, Estimation, and Control Conference (MECC 2024) in Chicago, Illinois, 27-30 October 2024. Held annually since 2021, MECC focuses on the intertwined research problems of building mathematical models of dynamic systems, fitting these models to measured data, and using the models for control algorithm design. The scope of the conference encompasses theoretical research as well as a broad range of applications, including the automatic control of (ground, air, marine, and space) vehicles, transportation networks, power/energy systems, robots, and biomedical systems, to name some examples. MECC is predominantly an academic research conference, with most attendees either seeking or already having doctoral degrees. The overarching goal of this grant is to broaden this audience significantly by recruiting and engaging K-12, undergraduate, and early-career graduate students. This recruitment effort will focus predominantly on students who have never attended a control conference before, with the goal of making the conference more accessible to female and underrepresented minority students.<br/><br/>Three education and outreach events will be created as part of this grant. These events will focus on introducing student participants to the automatic control discipline in general, its application to scaled autonomous vehicles, and its interplay with embedded computing. The speakers at these events will include a mix of researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry. Students will be recruited to these events from universities nationwide, as well as from a broad range of K-12 schools in the Chicago area. A panel of judges will select at least 40 of these students for support through this grant, with an emphasis on expanding conference participation and accessibility to a broad range of student participants. Funding will be used for supporting the students’ travel to the conference, providing them with access to take-home kits for their continued learning, and supporting the participation of a diverse range of speakers at the above three events. A key goal of these efforts will be to transform MECC itself, from an academic research conference to an event that brings research and teaching much closer together. Such a transformation will benefit all conference participants. It will broaden access to the conference by engaging a more diverse student population. It will also give the traditional conference attendees more of a chance to discuss both the intellectual merit of their research as well as the broader impact of this research, particularly given the broader and more diverse audience.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
