The following are some of my designs and programs that I have made throughout my four years at St. Olaf.
Student Government Association (SGA)
Public Relations Co-Coordinator (2007-2008)
The St. Olaf Student Government Association (SGA) provides funding for most student organizations on campus as well as its own programming including concerts, political events and media outlets. Students use SGA's services everyday, yet they are not aware of it. That's where I come in—educating students about what SGA does through promoting events and being a public relations resource to the various SGA committees.
During the past year, the other Public Relations Co-Coordinator and I have created branding standards for SGA so that the student body recognizes SGA's presence on campus and realizes the scope of SGA's programming and financial support. We have created designs that combine fun and professionalism. Below are examples of some of the print material I have created.
Learn more »
Multimedia Development Center (MDC)
Student Multimedia Consultant (2004-2008)
The Multimedia Development Center (MDC) dabbles in everything related to technology. We make posters, movies, audio clips, animations, websites and graphics. In addition, we present instructional software workshops and consult with various departments on Digital Asset Management. We are not the standard technology department; we do the fun and creative projects.
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Foundation Drawing
Student in Art 110: Foundation Drawing (Interim 2006)
This is one of my favorite classes I have taken at St. Olaf. I took it during January of my sophomore year. My eye for composition really developed through out this class. Here are a few examples:
See my portfolio from this class »
Stereo vision and segmentation research
Student Researcher (20 weeks), student group in CS 350: Advanced Team Project (Interim 2008)
Our focus in stereo vision concentrates on using two images of the same scene to create a grayscale disparity map, which shows the relative depth in the scene. To this end, we created a segmentation algorithm to segment each image into regions based on the color and shape information. Then our algorithm matches similar regions from the left image to regions in the right image. To decide "what is a good segmentation," we created an objective function that our algorithm minimizes for each image in the stereo pair.
I have researched stereo vision and segmentation for two summers and January 2008, in three different research groups. Our goal is to create an excellent segmentation algorithm for stereo imaging. Our algorithm has performed well on standard test images and our results are promising; however, our algorithm is not quite publishable.
We also built a visual debugger, Eriol, which allows us to test our segmentation algorithm, generate a stereo result and try different quality functions.
Note: I cannot show anymore about our research because it is unpublished. If it is published someday, I will put up more. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
Spatial clustering research
Student, class research project in CS 253: Algorithms and Data Structures
The Minnesota State High School League needed a better method for sectioning schools within athletic divisions. Currently, the sections are decided by drawing circles on a map.
My team developed an algorithm that creates a sectioning that minimizes the driving distance within each section. We developed a clustering algorithm that we believe reaches the global minimum for distance between schools, but there is no method to verify such a claim. Our paper was accepted in the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium, so we will be presenting our results at this conference. I will put up more about this after the conference.
Web Design for various clients
I have helped many different companies, organizations and individuals with their websites.
MSCS Department (Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science)
Web Developer (2006-2007)
The MSCS Department wanted an easy way to update their website so that any professor could contribute to the site. We also explored the idea of adding social networking for student and professors that could expand to the entire campus. I laid the foundation for this project before I left to study abroad and others have contributed far more since then.
A professor and I investigated many options for content management systems. We decided on a MediaWiki-based approach with a customized skin to match the St. Olaf template. Now with the right keyboard command those who have access can quickly upload files and edit pages using Wikitext.
Note: St. Olaf redesigned its website, so another web developer created the skin seen above.
Ambigram study
The same upside-down and upside-right
After reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, I became very interested in ambigrams. These are some of my tests. I am working on greater consistency so that the letters look natural, but that is very difficult.
Fractal generator
Student, class project in Math 250: Modern Computational Mathematics
I used the Random Iteration Algorithm, outlined by Michael Barnsley, to create Barnsley’s fern. I wrote this code in C++ and with this algorithm, I could generate a fractal with 100,000 points in about 0.21 seconds.
