During the Virtual Undergraduate Town Hall Event, you will join students from around the world in a virtual mentoring event where you will learn about cutting edge research in the field of computing. You will have the opportunity to ask distinguished computer scientists any questions you might have.

Research Presentation: Planning Motions for Robots, Crowds and Proteins

Motion planning has application in robotics, animation, virtual prototyping and training, and even protein folding and drug design. Surprisingly, sampling-based planning methods have proven effective on problems from all these domains. In this talk, we provide an overview of sampling-based planning and describe some variants developed in our group. We describe applications related to virtual prototyping, crowd simulation, and protein folding. For virtual prototyping, we show that in some cases a hybrid system incorporating both an automatic planner and haptic user input leads to superior results. For crowd simulation, we describe techniques for evacuation planning and for evaluating architectural designs. Finally, we describe our application of sampling-based motion planners to simulate molecular motions, such as protein and RNA folding.

Mentoring Topic: Why Recommendation Letters are Important and How to Cultivate Them

Many opportunities require you to provide references or letters of recommendation. At the same time, many students aren’t sure who or how to ask for them.  The truth of the matter is that good reference letters require some preparation and cultivation on the part of the recommendee – you! In this session, we’ll talk about what makes a good reference letter and simple things you can do now to put yourself in a good position to get one when you need it.

Post-Discussion Chat: Join Nancy Amato & Lori Pollock for a chat to continue the discussion on reference letters, meet fellow students, and share your experiences.

Join us June 13th at 5:30pm ET