Yosuke Higashi ’18 is the recipient of the 2017 Delaware Valley Engineers Week College Student Paper Award, an honor awarded each year for outstanding papers written by undergraduate engineering students attending colleges and universities in the Delaware Valley.

Higashi, an engineering and computer science major from Tokyo, Japan, focused his work on system identification, or the process of figuring out an accurate way to model a system that can be applied in many different circumstances in engineering. He was able to develop a version of an already existing method that was more effective with high levels of data noise. His modified system compares well with other, more well-established, methods of system identification.

Higashi is still revising the paper, in the hopes of publishing it. He collaborated most closely on the project with visiting professors of engineering Allan Moser and Michael Piovoso. Moser served as his primary mentor for the project and Piovoso helped during both the research and the writing stages of the paper.

“What is most impressive about Yosuke's work is that each time he came up against an obstacle that looked like it spelled the end of the line for progress on this method, he found some new way of getting around it,” says Moser. “Often, when I came in to check on how he was doing, I would find him at the blackboard, filling it with equations.”

Delaware Valley Engineers Week is an event run by the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia that celebrates the contributions engineers have made to technology and innovation, as well as promotes interest in math and science among younger students. It has been granting the College Student Paper Award for 32 consecutive years. Authors of five award-winning papers each year are recognized at a special event, in addition to receiving a cash prize.