Calvin Hayes
September 21, 2005
Period 5

Research Report

1. SchoolTools bounties:
Bounties are being offered to help the development of the SchoolTools interface. SchoolTools is a project to design a school administration infrastructure that can be used freely with and open source license. Current counties offered include developing a way to track demographics in school populations and creating an optimization algorithm for placing students in classes to satisfy their requests.


2. BLAST:
BLAST, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, is used in bioinformatics to find regions of local similarity in protein or nucleotide sequences. It can also determine that statistical significance of these matches and determine evolutionary patterns between gene sequences.


3. ROV:
The ROV competition, sponsored by the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center, requires that teams design and build robots to complete challenges underwater. The competition is aimed at promoting technical fields in marine environments and connecting students with employers in these areas.


4. MASON:
Projects can be constructed on the topic of modeling using the software MASON. Many applications for modeling have already been implemented, including a design by Dr. Ann Palkovich regarding the intelligence of great apes. The software runs algorithms for multiple agents efficiently and the results can be presented through graphs and charts.


5. Skinnerbots:
The Skinnerbots project at Carnegie Mellon University is aimed at creating a computational model for Pavlovian operant conditioning. The project implements these techniques by training a robot as one would train an animal. Researchers also are looking into the human-robot interaction when non-researchers try to train the robots.


6. The above project that is most similar to my project is the Skinnerbots project, because it also is on the topic of machine learning. My project, however, is focused on the use of genetic algorithms in game play, instead of neural networks in conditioning.