Research
Wayne Iba
One of my desires is to involve students in research. It is my belief that in doing so, students learn something deeper and more important than knowledge or skill. It is also my hope that students discover the opportunities available through advanced study in graduate school. I have prepared these guidelines for students interested in doing research with me. Note that two units of research (CS198) are required for all majors in Computer Science. If you are interested in any of the following topics or a research project of your own and you want to fulfill the research requirement under my supervision, carefully read the information about my expectations and then talk to me.
Some Possible Projects
Projects that I am either currently pursing or particularly interested in starting include:
- Service and Helpfulness. What is the nature of helpful service and how can we build intelligent systems that provide such assistance? How can we evaluate and measure good and bad service? Ultimately, how can we be better helpers and servants to each other?
- Computer Ethics and the Internet. An exploration into behavior-guiding principles in the internet or other virtual environments, particularly slanted toward the notion of ownership and property.
- Philosopher's Workbench. Can we build a suite of tools that help us explore various questions of traditional and computational Philosophy? What would such a suite include and which questions would be appropriate targets for exploration? Could we gain insights into epistemology or free will through simulated environments and artificial agents?
- Average-case analyses of machine learning algorithms. Requires a strong combinatorics/counting methods and general math skills, as well as a general interest in machine learning
- Westmont Cluster Project. Learn to program a Beowulf-class cluster computer. Develop systems that exploit the benefits of parallel computation. Serve other researchers in helping port their computational work onto our cluster.
- Bioinformatics. In general, I am interested in applying data mining techniques to problems in Biology. One particularly challenging problem with tremendous potential benefit is the development of an intuitive interface for biologists to mine the data they collect without assistance from computer scientists.