Douglas Brooks won the Best Poster Award at the 2011 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, held April 3-5 in San Francisco. Mr. Brooks is a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he works in the Human-Automation Systems Laboratory.

His poster, entitled "Quantifying Upper-Arm Rehabilitation Metrics through Interaction with a Humanoid Robot," describes using robotics to create an enjoyable physical rehabilitation session while obtaining quantifiable physical therapy metrics. By engaging the subject in a mimicking game with a humanoid robot, Mr. Brooks and his Ph.D. advisor Ayanna Howard use several image processing techniques in order to obtain the subject's arm positions throughout a video sequence. The arm positions are then used to determine the subject's range of motion and velocity data.

The Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, the Computing Research Association, and the IEEE Computer Society. The conference is named for Richard Tapia, a professor and mathematician at Rice University who is nationally known for his leadership in education and outreach.