HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE

Getting (Un)Lost in the Libra Complex…

In our early days at Mudd, how many of us took a turn in Keck - or is it Jacobs? - or Parsons? - only to find we were somewhere totally unexpected and unfamiliar? It may take a while to build useful mental models — maps — of the corridors of the Libra Complex, but it’s those internal maps that make ITR games, HvZ, and on-time arrival to class possible. Maps are even more important for robot tasks, because those systems lack other sources of environmental context; for example, accurate maps are the fundamental enabler of Google’s driverless cars. In this talk we present several types of maps that support robot navigation, drawing examples from the group’s work in creating and using them on a variety of robot platforms.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galapagos (and other true stories in computational biology)

In the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin wrote that he could imagine a pair of species - such as flowers and bees - evolving to adapt to one another. Darwin was imagining co-evolution. Over the next 150 years, scientists found considerable evidence for the co-evolution of species. However, only with the advent of computational methods have researchers been able to gain deep insights into co-evolutionary processes. In this talk, we describe an ongoing research and development project at Harvey Mudd that has resulted in a widely-used software tool called “Jane.” We show some of the features that the 2012 Jane team developed and implemented and we describe some of the ways that Jane has been used by researchers, including in a recent study (2011) of co-evolution in the Galapagos.