Nathan Bell's CS488 CS Senior Seminar Journal

Senior Project Page


• 10/17/04
  After mid-semester break Jim and I met on Monday to talk about choosing more direction for my project. We had a long conversation where we discussed the differences between improving a model's strategy and improving the model itself. It seems, if a strategy can't be found for a model when it does exist in the real world.

• 10/5/04
  I presented my survey today just in front of Jim. While I had my slides ready, I had not left enough time to prepare the order of my talk or how to transition my points. I didn't have any reminder for the order of my slides, and while I remembered their order well enough to transition between them, there was some doubt every time I changed slides. From my observations and Jim's comments, I need to revise the Survey paper and slides as well as refine the order of my presentation talk. The presentationi went okay, but really needs some polish.

• 9/2/04
  I've decided that while designing a program with facial expressions would be an interesting project, I couldn't rely on completing the project in time to use it in conjunction with my psychology project. So that idea is scrapped. A majority of my time on this project has been devoted to writing the survey, or summary of my research topic. While the paper is finished, I am still preparing the slides I will use when I present my survey.

• 9/26/04
  I have spent more time looking for articles about game theory and research done with the Prisoner's Dilemma. I also spent some time looking at human computer interaction. This involves research to test how computers with human characteristics are liked by humans who interact with them. This research may possibly be used for my psychology project, but the difficulty of creating a program with human characteristics, especially a face, is a concern. Perhaps a CS project designing a program with these properties could be done.

• 9/22/04
  Greg and I had our discussion in class today. We focused on biometrics, its real world application, and various privacy, security, and accuracy issues.

• 9/19/04
  In an attempt to ease my work load this semester, I've tried to combine my psychology and computer science projects. The topic I have chosen to focus on deals with game theory. Specifically, I'm interested in the Prisoner's Dilemma which is a non-zero sum game. Though I'm focusing on the Prisoner's Dilemma, other games are still a possibility. I am also interested in emergent behavior and I'm still looking for a way to combine game theory with this aspect of computer science. In the mean time I'm still reading and trying to pin down the specifics of my project.