Bill Steele/Cornell Chronicle

The Cornell Ranger, a highly efficient walking robot, paraded up and down the atrium all day. Designed to help understand the mechanics of human walking, it can go about a kilometer on one battery charge.

Lindsay France/University Photography

Joseph Nelson displays the "Where's the BOOM?" award presented by faculty for the project "Subni Rfid," a system integrating radio-frequency ID chips with the Web.

Bill Steele/Cornell Chronicle

A simple board game created by the Experimental Game Design course to illustrate strategy challenges players to move their strings across the board and capture the opponent's paper clip.

Once upon a time, computing was just for computer scientists. Today, practically every machine has a chip in it, and most of our work involves some sort of processing, networking or data storage and retrieval.

The annual BOOM (Bits On Our Minds) exhibition is a celebration of the ubiquitousness of computing. Although run by Cornell's Department of Computer Science, it invites students from every college to display projects using digital technology. This year's exhibition, held Feb. 28, filled the Duffield Hall Atrium with booths, posters and gadgets and drew hundreds of visitors.

Computer science students were certainly there, some with posters describing arcane advances in database management and networking, others with practical ideas to speed up airplane boarding or schedule courses. Engineers tended to dominate the landscape, with self-driving cars and planes and a variety of robots. But also in evidence were computer-generated art and music and even some computer-based sociology.

Several projects earned awards:

• AmEbot, an amorphous robot that emulates the motion of an amoeba, given by event sponsor Credit Suisse.
• Sound Sculpture: Timbre and Movement, a system creating sounds in a 3-D space, given by event sponsor Cisco.
• Subni Rfid, a system integrating radio frequency ID chips with the Web to locate and identify objects that could potentially assist the visually impaired, the "Where's the BOOM?" award, chosen by computer science and information science faculty.
• The Cornell Ranger, a robot that showed off throughout the event by walking from one end of the atrium to the other, The People's Choice Award, based on votes from attendees.

The Where's the BOOM Youth Essay Contest for local area middle and high school students remains open until March 15.

A list of all BOOM exhibits is online at http://www.cis.cornell.edu/boom/2007sp/.