This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Oliver Bowen ’05 (Johannesburg, South Africa) conducted research to help simplify a complex computer language and plans to present his findings at conferences.
An electrical and computer engineering major with a minor in computer science, Bowen worked alongside John Nestor, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“We worked on ways to devise a pictorial guide to a program called Verilog, which is a hardware description language, or HDL, used to design electronic circuits,” explains Nestor. “It’s an enormous, unwieldy program that consists of thousands of lines of code. They are very complex, so we tried to break them down into bite-size pieces to get a bird’s-eye view of all the files.”
The collaboration was part of Lafayette’s distinctive EXCEL Scholars program, in which students assist faculty with research while earning a stipend. Lafayette is a national leader in undergraduate research. Many of the 180 students who participate in EXCEL each year go on to publish papers in scholarly journals and/or present their research at conferences.
Says Bowen, “Verilog is similar to other computer programming languages except in the way that it can be directly translated into a physical circuit design. Large-scale design projects written in Verilog can easily span thousands of lines of code. It is difficult to keep track of the code and difficult to get an overview of the various Verilog components.”
The two collaborated to write a separate program in Java to help simplify the complex computer language. Bowen credits his mentor with offering just the right amount of guidance and independence.
“Professor Nestor provided me with assistance whenever I needed it, but at the same time allowed me to work on the project at my own pace,” he says.
A frequent mentor for student research projects, Nestor received the American Society for Engineering Education’s John A. Curtis Award for presenting the best paper at its 2002 annual conference. A senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers since 1991, Nestor also received an award for best paper at the 22nd International Workshop on Microprogramming and Microarchitecture. He has published research in leading academic journals, serves as a technical reviewer for such journals, as well as for international and national conferences, and book publishers, and has reviewed for and obtained grants from the National Science Foundation. He is a program committee member of this year’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Microelectronics System Education.
“EXCEL is a good opportunity to learn a lot, work on something I enjoy, and at the same time, earn some money,” Bowen says. “It provides students with an excellent opportunity to get involved in research. The Lafayette environment stimulates a lot of professor-student interaction, which is essential for this sort of project. This research project also tied in very well with what I would like to do in the future.It combined interests from my major and from my minor.”
Eventually, Nestor and Bowen hope to develop a visualization tool and submit it for presentation at the Design Automation Conference. The results of this project will also be submitted for presentation at one or more research conferences.
Bowen serves as a resident adviser, is a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity and the International Students Association, and participates in intramural sports.