2014 Graduate and Professional Student Research Conference

     The 2014 Graduate and Professional Student Research Conference was held in Ames, IA on Friday, April 4, and I attended the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Student Competition. During the competition, ten students were each given three minutes to describe the thesis of their research as graduate or professional students in their respective major. I paid close attention to those who earned their undergraduate degree in engineering, and so one student named Kevin Townsend presented his research in computer engineering. In his presentation, Kevin described how he is researching ways that computers can access memory (RAM) quicker, while not utilizing cache. This is very interesting to me, because his work could lead to computers becoming much faster in their processing power, especially with computer users requiring much more data storage than in the past. I captured a video describing the presentation criteria and what the judges were looking for when evaluating the quality of each of the student's presentations. In addition, I filmed Kevin Townsend's presentation as an example of how the competition proceeded. 

Video of the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Student Competition: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JBud7XNqzg