Zhiqiang Wan, who is pursuing a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Rhode Island, was named this year’s winner of the URI Graduate Student Research and Scholarship Excellence Award in Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering.

“This is a tremendous honor,” said Wan. “It motivates me to continue to work hard on my research.”

Wan, who is a native of Nan Chang, China, holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering from universities in China.

“Zhiqiang has an outstanding mathematics background, as well as programming skills, which enables him to integrate the analytical research with modeling and simulation via the powerful computing platforms in the Computational Intelligence and Self-Adaptive Systems (CISA) Lab,” said Haibo He, chair of URI’s Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering.

Two research projects that Wan developed in the last year were a Visual Question Answering System and a Robot-Assisted Pedestrian Crowd Regulation System. Both were published in research journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

The Visual Question Answering System uses artificial intelligence to help visually impaired users know the world around them by generating answers about their surroundings based on its interpretations.

The Robot-Assisted Pedestrian Crowd Regulation System helps avoid accidents in densely populated areas by making optimal motion decisions that maximize the pedestrian outflow.