Programs & Labs
Spring 2005
2004 Student of the Year contributes to vision-based traffic monitoring
2004 Student of the Year Nathaniel Bird receives the award from ITS Institute director Dr. Max Donath
The 2004 ITS Institute Outstanding Student of the Year award was presented to Nathaniel Bird. Bird is a Master of Science in Computer Science candidate at the University of Minnesota. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering with high honors from Ohio Northern University, and is a registered Engineer in Training in the State of Ohio.
Bird has been a key asset to one of the Institute's high-profile research topics: Monitoring Human Activities at Bus Stops, led by Computer Science professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos. Bird is currently working on developing automated intelligent vision-based traffic monitoring systems that can aide a human user in the process of risk detection and analysis. His work was applied to the problem of detecting drug-related activities at bus stops and received great reviews from the community.
Bird has shown excellence in the classroom by earning a 4.0 GPA as a graduate student. He has been involved in numerous honor societies, including the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and the Sigma Pi Sigma Physics Honor Society. His classroom success has not only been recognized by being on the Dean's List at Ohio Northern University for each of his 12 semesters, but also by being awarded scholarships such as the Robert C. Byrd Scholarship from the Ohio Board of Regents and a University of Minnesota Computer Science fellowship.
Bird also has an extensive list of publications, and a nomination for the best ICRA 2004 Vision Paper Award. He has been an author for multiple other journals and conference papers. His current advisor describes Nate as "very well-organized and able to view a problem from several different perspectives without any difficulties."