Friday, September 3, 2010

Senior Project

It's official, senior project has begun. The professor, Bruce Sanders, just finalized teams and projects. It's been a bit of a bumpy ride for me, getting through this process. Two weeks ago, I thought I had everything laid out. I had a project lined up, working for the startup that I interviewed with over the summer, with the other student they had considered hiring, plus whoever we could find for our team of 4 to 5. Unfortunately, at the last minute, we gained too many people for the team. Our extras just happened to be all of her friends. I guess the kind way of saying it is that she found people that she knew she could work with. The unkind way of saying it is that even though we were basically equals, she still decided she had the authority to kick me off in favor of her friends. It's too bad, because I was really looking forward to that project.

But the good news is that I think I've a good team and project. I'll be working with one guy I've worked with before, and along with the other three, it seems like we'll work well together. We're working on a portion of AgentCubes, a programming "language" that Prof. Alex Repenning created. It's a fairly simple environment where icons and objects on the "stage" are programmed with behaviors, and can then interact. Prof. Repenning uses it to teach computer science to non-computer-science folks, like middle school students and high school teachers. AgentSheets was the original version, and was all 2D; AgentCubes is the attempt to bring it into 3D in order to make it more fun and compelling. It has a feature, called Inflatable Icons, that takes 2D images and "inflates" them like balloons to easily create 3D models. Our team's job is going to be making that work on the internet, with the help of the emerging WebGL standard. With WebGL, it's going to be possible to make 3D games and displays and embed them within websites. It's been possible before with some obscure, proprietary tools, but WebGL promises to be an open standard, a huge step forward.

My other classes are going pretty well so far. My stats class is the class I've been dreaming about ever since I came to CU; it's actually applied! We're using a professional computer program on real industry data sets. Every other math class I've taken that had Applied in the title turned out to be a huge disappointment. The professor, Jeffrey Luftig, has a couple of decades of experience as an industry statistician, and really seems to know what he's talking about. It helps that he's also a riot!