Yaser Sheikh, assistant research professor in the Robotics Institute, and Alan Black, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute, are among five winners nationwide of 2010 Honda Initiation Grants.

Honda R&D Americas and Honda Research Institute US, Inc., presented $50,000 grants to each of the winners in the competitive program at the HIG 2010 Symposium in Columbus, Ohio, July 8. Chosen from among 260 applicants across a diverse range of disciplines, Sheikh received funding for his project, Dynamic Visual SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping): Reconstructing Dynamic Environments from Mobile Cameras, while Black received funding for his project on Conversational Speech Synthesis. Other winners hailed from Georgia Tech, University of Houston and Duke University