Professors are Geek Award nominees | The Triangle

Professors are Geek Award nominees

Youngmoo Kim and Andy Hicks, two professors at Drexel University, have been nominated for awards at the second annual Philadelphia Geek Awards, which will be held Aug.17.

The nominations, which were announced July 5, revealed the two professors would be competing in the same category: Scientist of the Year.

According to the biographies of the men listed on the Philadelphia Geek Awards website, Hicks, a mathematics professor at Drexel, was nominated for patenting a side-view mirror that uses a mathematical algorithm to create a wide field of view and minimal blind spots, as reported in the last issue of The Triangle.

Kim, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and assistant dean of engineering for media technologies at Drexel, was nominated for creating “the research group the Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab) to focus on the machine understanding of audio in regards to music information retrieval. The MET-lab also researches human-machine interfaces and robotics for expressive interaction, analysis-synthesis of sound, and K-12 outreach for engineering, science, and mathematics education.”

The black-tie awards ceremony was launched in 2011 by Eric Smith and Tim Quirino, who are known for their work on the local blog Geekadelphia, and by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

The Geek Awards, which sold out in their inaugural year, are returning with new categories and special guests, including “local comedian and author Doogie Horner, Christopher Wink and Brian James Kirk of Technically Philly, celebrated photographer Kyle Cassidy, video game journalist Chris Grant, Leah Cevoli of Robot Chicken, [and] award-winning comic book authors Tony Trov and Johnny Zito,” according to a press release.