Undergraduate Highlights

Data Visualization

I took Colin Ware's Data Visualization class. This is one of my best results: a 2-d rendering of North Pacific Ocean currents.

I highly recommend his book, Information Visualization: Perception for Design. It gives a lot of detail on how to exploit the way your eye handles data to give better presentation to your data. He also can show you some creepy demonstrations that will make it clear how little of the world our eyes can actually perceive.

Taxi Scheduling

Before I learned AI or combinatorics, I worked on a group project where we built a single-agent planner for a fleet of taxi cabs. I wrote an O(2ⁿ) algorithm for dispatching cabs to service various requests.

While inefficient, it was the only scheduler in the class that could reduce the overall trip times of the cabs by keeping them on the road between pickups. My algorithm recognized situations where having cabs take a sub-optimal route between a dropoff and the next pickup was cheaper than heading to the nearest wait station and dispatching a second cab for the pickup.

We named our project after the 1994 ~~classic~~ obscure DOS game Quarantine.

Ocaml

I highly recommend this book, and not just because Jon Harrop was nice enough to rush ship it to me for no extra charge. It is a wealth of tips, recipes, and tutorials on the various features and libraries in the Ocaml language. The book includes highlighted source code and even performance analysis of various functional programming techniques.

Order the book or just check out the examples with source code if you're looking for a taste of what the book has to offer.