Avik with a vehicle he designed

Who: Avik De, a third-year mechanical engineering student at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He went to school at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Calcutta, before joining JHU in September, 2006. His research paper on Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) was selected by the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics to be presented at the Eighth International Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics at Guanajuato, Mexico, in December.

Why: The 20-year-old has a stellar academic record with a GPA of 3.94 and a full-tuition scholarship. He was also the recipient of the 2008 Summer Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award at the university. Avik has been invited to join Tau Beta Pi and Pi Tau Sigma, both academic honour societies. He is also a member of the university’s Baja SAE team, which Avik explains, “is an engineering design competition where undergrads design and build a one-seat off-road vehicle completely from scratch and race it against other schools.”

Influences: “I started working with Dr Noah Cowan towards the end of my freshman year. Over the first summer he gave me the liberty of picking interesting topics and I picked dynamic obstacle avoidance for mobile robots as my area of interest. It is this research that gradually led me towards SLAM,” explains Avik. He considers Cowan, his research advisor, to be his greatest inspiration because “he is outstanding when it comes to thinking of new ways to old do things.”

Geek quotient: The paper that he presented on Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping is a relatively new field in robotics. “The idea is to make the robot completely autonomous, so that when placed in an unknown environment it can explore and create an accurate map of its surroundings.” Now if that’s not geeky enough for you, he has also designed vehicles during his freshman and sophomore years.

Fun factor: The superbrain still manages to pack in some fun despite all the slogging. So has he followed fellow Baltimore resident Michael Phelps into the pool? The short answer: Yes! “Phelps certainly is a big deal here these days. I started swimming a lot more recently, I don’t know if it’s related at all though,” he jokes.

Future plans: Avik wants to be a teacher. He says that’s his dream job, because “you have the freedom to explore your own ideas and communicate with the brightest minds out there.” And yes, he does want to bring his talent back home to India one day.