My current side project involves developing a simulation of a robotic swarm being coordinated by simple biological control laws. Particularly, this implementation is based off of the popular Boids simulation, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. The Boids model demonstrates that multiple, independent agents can display complex, coordinated behaviors when being guided by only three simple control laws:

Using only these three laws, with the parameters set just right, a collection of identical agents will display behavior similar to a flock of birds or a school of fish(...)

As a Ph.D. student in the Intelligent Systems Program, housed within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, I am working with Dr. Michael Lewis on a number of questions regarding emergent behavior, applying biological control laws to artificial agents, and the human control of robotic swarms and multi-robot teams. My current project involves using genetic algorithms and machine learning to develop algorithms for robotic teams performing exploration and target-searching tasks. Because achieving effective control of even a small number of robots operating simultaneously is a difficlt task, the goal of this line of research is to use techniques in machine learning and evolution to design controllers, embedded with the goals of the user and the task, to put onboard the deployed robots to allow them to search an environment intelligently.

There are two main goals involved with this research. First, we would like to use data from human participants performing target-searching and exploration tasks to determine(...)

In the spring of 2008, a friend of mine and I decided to start a service trip at William and Mary that would have 14 students travelling to Belize every winter during the semester break to work at a rural elementary school. This was not a completely random endeavor, however. We had both been to this area of Belize before, as part of our church back home, Trinity Presbyterian in Arlington, Virginia. We were also looking to improve on past experiences of our own regarding international service trips. My friend, Laura Nelson, had traveled earlier that year to Guatemala as part of another W&M trip, and I had applied to others previously and been turned down (not an uncommon feature of W&M service trips—during our first year of our own trip we accepted less than 20% of our applicants). Therefore, instead of both of us reapplying to new trips the next year, we decided to start one of our own.

Over the last two years to structure and mission of the organization has changed slightly, but the same basic idea remains the same(...)