24.4.09

"he's just another...."

Here are my capstone reviews from this year:

Robot Localization Techniques by Stella Stamenova

The main ideas found in Stella’s CS topic included several techniques for determining the location of a robot in Olin Rice. She conducted this honor’s project with Susan Fox, attempting to get Professor Fox’s robot to deliver mail through the building. She used sampling and probability functions to determine location through sonar, and comparison functions for comparing outlines taken from photos. The whole project was written in Java, so she used a lot of computer science problem solving techniques. The talk was very effective, because she knew her topic well, and also knew her audience would understand the content. She also did a good job identifying further research that could be done.

Planning the Perfect Party by Stella Stamenova

The main ideas found here in Stella’s math talk were graph theory and ramsey numbers. The idea was that when a graph was put through this function, it could be 2-colored in only certain ways, and that’s where I lost her talk. I haven’t taken any abstract algebra, so the talk was very difficult to understand. She realized that she was going to lose people, which was the smart way to present, but it made it difficult to understand. Since she was less sure of her audience’s ability to understand, the presentation Stella gave wasn’t as quality as her CS capstone.