I'm a Master's student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. My advisor is Dr. Pradeep Khosla, formerly the director of ICES here at CMU, and as of July 1 is the new department head here in ECE. Congrats, Pradeep! Unfortunately, recently at the ECE Fall Picnic, he took one for the team as he broke his arm. Ouch! Under him, I'm working on the Self-Adaptive Software project. Within that project, I'm working on developing a framework for decomposing a task among multple robots so that they cooperative accomplish that task.
I'm originally from Dallas, TX. But after 12 or so years there, I moved to Memphis, TN, where my family still lives. But in any case, I'm still a Southerner trapped in the North while I'm here at CMU. I don't know that I'll ever get used to having winters where it snows more than an inch during a storm.
I did my undergrad at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. There I double majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I love Nashville. A city that's not too large, but still has all the cultural opportunities and good points of a big city.
To look at a video (filmed and edited by yours truly) of a recent (actually not so recent anymore) demo of Self-Adaptive Software in action, click here.
As an added step in my work on robots, last spring I took the Mechatronics class. In it, we designed, build and programmed a robot to detect and mark landmines (actually they were just small metal plates, not even buried or anything but you get the point). It had a few problems when it actually came to doing the demo (it kinda got caught in a corner of the field and only tagged two of the fifteen mines. Oops.) But the important part is that we learned a lot--most importantly spend the money on high quality sensors. Never skimp on that. All the algorithms in the world can only do so much for a robot that misperceives its environment.
Here's a picture of the robot:
And another from before it was finished.
My Resume or in MS Word 2000 format
My Personal page
Port-Based
Adaptable Agents
Dept.
of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Institute
for Complex Engineered Systems
Page last modified on September 18, 1999. If you have comments or suggestions, email me at jackson4@andrew.cmu.edu