Empower the Innovators of Tomorrow

Student participation on engineering projects both in and out of the classroom is essential to fostering innovation and inspiring the next generation of engineers. More than 400 students and educators attended the Academic Forum at NIWeek 2010, which is twice the number of attendees in 2009.

During the forum, academic professionals shared best practices in engineering education methodologies, discussed the future of engineering, and networked with colleagues from around the world. At this event, NI also provided a venue for students to network, collaborate, and submit their best engineering projects through the NI LabVIEW Student Design Showcase. To increase submissions to the contest and provide a platform for students to amplify their engineering expertise, NI evolved the showcase into the LabVIEW Student Design Competition. With this new forum, students see how their peers are using LabVIEW to engineer a better world and vote for their favorite design projects, which span from affordable medical devices to complex underwater autonomous vehicles.

In 2011, the company’s goal is to increase participation in the LabVIEW Student Design Competition by receiving 250 submissions to the contest, which is more than twice the number of submissions in 2010.

Students Leading the Way in Graphical System Design
Students continue to find new and exciting ways to engineer a better world and meet the Grand Challenges for Engineering using NI technologies. At the 2010 Graphical System Design Achievement Awards, the annual NI awards ceremony recognizing engineers and scientists worldwide who are making an impact with NI technologies and the graphical system design platform, NI President, Cofounder, and CEO Dr. James Truchard awarded Dr. Dennis Hong, Greg Jannaman, and Kimberly Wenger from Virginia Tech with the 2010 Customer Application of the Year award. Their award-winning application was a semiautonomous vehicle that allows a blind driver to successfully navigate, control speed, and avoid collision through a secure driving course. Using LabVIEW and NI modular hardware, they developed a prototype for their vehicle that was versatile and easy to adapt to unique and demanding testing environments, changing vehicle platforms, and shifting project objectives.

To further distinguish students who are changing the world through graphical system design, NI recognized students from the University of Colorado as the LabVIEW Student Design Showcase winners for their project in which they developed an acoustic network system capable of relaying and executing mission plans from an operator to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) via underwater transmission.

Ambassadors for Graphical System Design
To encourage participation and collaboration between engineering students with a desire to learn LabVIEW and share that knowledge with their peers, NI created the LabVIEW Student Ambassador program in 2010. LabVIEW Student Ambassadors serve as an important LabVIEW training resource, giving their peers the opportunity to achieve LabVIEW proficiency by hosting presentations and training workshops through their local universities. NI strives to give students a deeper understanding of the technologies and solutions needed to develop modern engineering applications and seeks to help 1,350 college students reach proficiency through LabVIEW Student Ambassador workshops in 2011.

Additionally, the LabVIEW Student Ambassador program is inspiring future engineering innovators to help meet the grand challenges for engineering. Andy Milluzzi, a LabVIEW Student Ambassador at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, shared his thoughts on one of the grand challenges:

"I am really interested in helping develop better medicine. I have several friends and family members who benefited significantly from medical advancement. I think this is a good way to use my skills as an engineer to give back to the world at large. In the last 100 years, medicine has made some great advancements. I want to be part of the advances that happen in the next 100 years."