Senior presentations are quickly approaching, only a bit more than a month away.  There will also be a practice run of my Math presentation a week after spring break, on Tuesday, April 10th.  For those of you curious for more information about my projects I’m posting my two abstracts below.

Wavelets and Filters

Wavelets, which are localized waves, are an exciting new alternative to Fourier series to analyze mathematical signals.  Some emerging applications of wavelets include data compression and feature extraction in sound and image processing, including the new JPEG2000 standard.  We will specifically explore the Haar Wavelet, which is a pulse of 1 and -1 over a finite range.  The Haar Wavelet is just one of many wavelets to have the important property of orthogonality and we will show how this can be used to establish a basis from a collection of wavelets.

Path Finding with Computer Vision

Computer vision is an exciting field in computer science with many practical applications in both civilian and military settings.  Unfortunately, images are a complicated form of data for a computer system to interpret; but with computer vision, an application can be programmed to extract the desired information.  The application I developed enables a LEGO MINDSTORMS rover to navigate a path, avoiding obstacles while moving towards a user-provided destination.  Such automated responses are important when precise movement and quick reactions are required or when human guided movement is impractical. Images are gathered from an overhead camera and sent to a computer vision system where they are analyzed with a canny edge map to detect possible obstacles.  The rover is then sent updated movement orders through an infrared transmitter to detour around the obstacles without human intervention.  I will discuss the design of the application, the object detection algorithms that I implemented, and provide a demonstration of the rover in action.

Hope to see you in April!

As a New Year’s treat, I will un-hide the information page I made for my latest game in progress, RPG and a Half: The Final Level is Only the Beginning.  Motivation for this project has yet to return so I cannot make any promises at this time if 2007 will see the release of this game.

Whatever the case, enjoy the page.

And remember, BluHelix Studios wishes everyone a happy New Year.

Strain CS Lab on October 10, 2006 at 4:30pm

Computer vision is an exciting field in computer science with many practical applications in both civilian and military settings.  Join us as we explore the basic steps to give a computer the ability to interpret its own surroundings in a visual way.  We will then investigate how to build an automated system to navigate a robotic vehicle through unknown terrain guided only by a camera with an overhead view of the environment.

Basically it’s a day to show your system administrator that you care for all the hard work required to troubleshoot whatever problems you might run into and for ensuring all things in the electronic world can play nicely with each other and their human controllers.

http://www.sysadminday.com/

Typical observances of this holiday are to present gifts to your Sysadmin. These gifts include chocolate, beer, wine, electronic toys, video games, and cake & ice cream.

>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysadmin_Day

Now this sounds like my kind of holiday!

Lyrics to the System Administrator Day song

There’s a guy who works in another room, or on another floor.
He’s the one you call, when your document ain’t there no more.
He’s probably a boy, but he might be a girl, or something in between.
He’s the only one in the office who knows what PC Load Letter means.

He’s your system administrator, he’s probably into comic books.
And you tremble in fear when you have to hear one of his “What a dummy!” looks.
Got a virus? Lost your password? Or you just can’t print?
In an hour he’ll show up and crouch and squint.
Fight to save your files, he might be there all day,
But sometimes he just presses Caps Lock and walks away.

(Spoken) But HEY! Suddenly my password works! Wow! Hooray!

Hooray, hooray, oh happy day! I’m gonna buy my guy a gift to say:
Having you around means I get to stay stupid! and uninformed!
And I can keep opening dot e-x-e file attachments,
And forgetting my mother’s maiden name, ’cause you’ll fix it all for me, Yay!

I’ll give you a cake, I’ll give you a hug,
I’ll buy the world’s best System Administrator mug.
Just help me out, system administrator.
Please plug in my mouse, system administrator.
I don’t know which button is the mouse click button, system administrator.

Piss him off, and you’ll be fired by tomorrow morn.
‘Cause he’s the guy who knows that you’ve been surfing porn.
So, make sure you stay nice to your system administrator.

>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysadmin_Day