The 22 international students participating in the UPWARDS Summer Camp made the most of their two days with Virginia Tech in the greater Washington, D.C., area, programming drones and robots, learning about artificial intelligence chip design, and meeting with faculty, and talking with leaders from Tokyo Electron Limited.
And that was before they took a bus to Manassas for a tour of MICRON Technology Inc.
Camp participants — all from partner institutions Hiroshima University, Kyushu University, Nagoya University, Tohoku University, and the Institute of Science Tokyo – had expressed interest in electrical, computer, or materials science or chemical engineering. The D.C. area sessions held Aug. 2-4 were led by Yang “Cindy” Yi, an expert on integrated systems and circuits who spearheads the faculty-student exchange portion of the UPWARDS grant for Virginia Tech. Ph.D. students in computer engineering were on hand to guide campers through experiments and mini competitions.
“This is a very big opportunity for students to come to the United States,” said Ramashish Gaurav, a Ph.D. student who collaborates with Yi. “Our goal is to create a good experience for the participants so they leave with positive feeling about our labs.”
Team experiments took place in the Institute for Advanced Computing’s two-story drone cage, cyber-physical systems lab, and multifunctional integrated circuits and systems lab in Academic Building One in Alexandria. Students participated in a group discussion with leaders from Tokyo Electron Limited and also met with Virginia Tech’s Luke Lester and Kirk Cameron, the institute’s interim director.
Participants also were treated to numerous technical sessions for integrated circuits during the week of July 28 on the university’s Blacksburg campus.
The U.S.-Japan University Partnership for Workforce Advancement and Research and Development in Semiconductors (UPWARDS) is funded by Micron Technology Inc., Tokyo Electronics, and the National Science Foundation to advance semiconductor and integrated circuit chips research. The partnership, also called UPWARDS For the Future, brings together 11 universities from across the U.S. and Japan to grow the next-generation workforce.
