Lan Bai Receives Anna Olcott Smith Award

Lan Bai, Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering working with Professor Robert Dick in the Solid State Electronics Laboratory, has been awarded a 2011 Anna Olcott Smith Award by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.

Lan’s research interests include embedded systems, especially wireless sensor networks. She is currently working on techniques to simplify and automate the design of wireless sensor networks. Lan has been developing specification, modeling, automated design, and compilation techniques to enable application experts without embedded system design experience (such as biologists, civil engineers, and farmers) to develop complex distributed wireless sensing systems. The high-level specification language lets application experts easily describe the functionality and requirements of ones sensor network application without being concerned about low-level implementation details. The automated design tool generates implementation details to meet specified design requirements.

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About the Award

Ella Smith Avery made a gift to the University of Michigan in 1938 to honor the memory of her mother and to support graduate students in perpetuity. According to the terms of the gift, the Anna Olcott Smith Fellowship Endowment aids graduate students who show “promise of the development of useful original ideas.”

Recipients of the Anna Olcott Smith Award will have demonstrated exceptional scholarly achievement, a sense of social responsibility and service, and a lively interest in promoting the success of women in the academic community.