ECE team advances in contest to design the car of the future

Wednesday, May 7, 2014
A smarter, more intuitive car?  That's what three electrical and computer engineering doctoral candidates are competing to design in the Valeo Innovation Challenge, a global contest open to engineering students around the world to create a product or system that will produce better cars by 2030.  
The team of Hassan Omar, Sailesh Bharati, and Ning Lu, known as The Three VeMAColleagues, is one of only 20 out of 969 from 455 universities around the world to advance to the prototyping phase of the challenge. The students are members of the Broadband Communications Research Group are supervised by electrical and computer engineering professors Weihua Zhuang and Xuemin (Sherman) Shen.
 
The challenge was launched in September 2013 by Valeo, an independent industrial group focused on the design, production and sale of components, integrated systems and modules for the automotive industry, mainly for CO2 emissions reduction. Out of the 20 teams, six will be selected to present their project to the jury at the Paris Motor Show in October 2014. The winning team will receive a €100,000 prize and the second and third-place teams will each receive €10,000.