The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), in collaboration with John Deere, is pleased to announce that five students from San Jose State University have won the 2nd annual standards simulation competition, held on October 27 at San Jose State University in Santa Clara, California. Over the course of six hours, student participantsranging from undergraduate to graduates and mentors representing universities across the country simulated the standardization development process to develop a visual, text-free, or minimal text international standard.
ANSI congratulates event winners: students Usman Choudhery (team leader), Simran Bhalla, Harshada Abhay Tupe, Jiayue Wang, Ahdithan Uthayakumar, and faculty member Nitin Aggarwal, who served as team mentor.
Playing the Role of Standardization Leaders: Consensus Begins with Conversation
Typically, the development of an actual voluntary consensus standard may involve multiple meetings over the course of several months. By contrast, the simulation contest was an opportunity to condense the process into a day of negotiation and one overarching lesson for students involved: consensus begins with conversation. [Read more about the international standardization process].
ANSI and John Deere collaborated with Professor Jeffrey Strauss of Northwestern University, who developed the competition material and facilitated the event.
Mentors were on hand to guide each of the six university teams, representing the University of Colorado Boulder, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, the City College of New York (CCNY), and San Jose State University (SJSU), which had three teams.
"As a mentor, I am really proud of San Jose State University students," said Aggarwal. "The multidisciplinary nature of the team allowed the students to view the problems from different perspectives. Their hard work and perseverance combined with access to knowledge and resources served them well." He added: "Even though only one team won, all the teams performed very well and demonstrated a deep understanding of the subject matter and willingness to collaborate."
Judges included academic and industry stakeholders and members of ANSI's Committee on Education (CoE), who evaluated each team's strategies, tactics, and interactions, and gave recommendations for scores based on how well each team met its objectives in the development of the final standard.
They included Stephen Elliott, Purdue University; Monte Bogatz, IAPMO; Tim West, Deere & Company; Randi Myers, UL; and Yatin Trivedi, IEEE.
First-place winners each received an Apple iPad Pro. The members of the other five teams each received portable jolt chargers for participating. In addition, all students received an ANSI certificate of participation.
"It was inspiring to see what the students achieved during their participation, as well as seeing the commitment from the experts serving as mentors and judges," said Ms. Myers.
"The ANSI standards competition is an excellent competition which simulates real-world situations and provides students with the opportunity to get a glimpse of how professional standard negotiations are conducted, and the value of the experience gained from the [day] is undeniable," added Choudhery.
See images of the event on ANSI's Flickr page and the event video on YouTube.