Summer 2020 Research and Scholarship

Introduction and Overview of the Project Hello everyone! Our names are Hana Ahmed, Meg Kaye, and Nico Espinosa Dice, and we are working with Prof. George Montañez in the AMISTAD Lab (Artificial Machine Intelligence = Search Targets Awaiting Discovery) to formulate a mathematical theory of abductive reasoning. We hope to produce a machine learning model and graphical representation of creative problem-solving using abduction.  Many people are aware of induction and deduction as forms of logical reasoning. However, abduction is arguably the closest resemblance of day-to-day human reasoning processes. Abduction, while still loosely defined, is rooted in the generation of plausible explanatory hypotheses that are consistent with observed facts. The concept of abductive logic is generally associated with the mathematician and philosopher Charles Sanders (C.S.) Peirce, and is regularly applied in real-life problem-solving tasks, such as medical diagnosis and criminology. Abduction, D...

Hi Everyone, I am Linda Li, a rising sophomore from Harvey Mudd College. Over the past weeks, I have worked in Lab for Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics (LAIR) under the supervision of Prof Clark. I am excited to share some of my progress with you all. I am working on Shark Tracking with AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) project, where we want to develop a multi-AUV system to track tagged sharks for a long period of time.  At the beginning of this summer, I explored and implemented path planning algorithms such that AUVs will be able to plan the optimal path from current positions to the target sharks while avoiding obstacles along the way. I focused on the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm. This algorithm finds the path from the starting point to the goal by iterating the process of randomly choosing a point in the whole space, connecting this point with the closest point in the tree, and testing if the new subpath is collision-free with any obstacles until it hit...

Hello everyone! I’m Tejus, and I’m working with Prof. Spencer to develop a device for underwater acoustic power and data transmission. Eventually, we hope that this system will be useful for fish tracking applications. During the school year, my fellow researchers include and have included Martha Gao, Anneka Noe, Ilona Kariko, Aditya Khant, Christopher Ferrarin, Richard Zhang, and David Olumse. Most fish tracking technology relies on the trilateration of an acoustic ping from an actively powered fish tag (Fig. 1). This is cumbersome, however, because the tag requires a battery that typically only lasts a few days and several hydrophones positioned at the surface of the ocean are required to capture and process the tag’s signal.  Figure 1: An active fish-tag transmits acoustic pings to several hydrophones on the surface. For the past several years, researchers in ACE lab have been developing a system of battery-less fish trackers that would circumvent many of the current limitations...

Hello, this is Ben Bracker, HMC class ‘22, engineering major. I am working with Prof. Spencer’s ACE lab to study MEM relays. This post shows how these devices work and what we have been up to now that we are working remotely. A relay is a type of electrical switch that opens and closes automatically in response to an electrical control signal.  A Micro Electro-Mechanical (MEM) relay is a micrometer-scale electrical switch whose mechanical motion is controlled by electrostatic forces.   All electrical switches connect or disconnect at least two wires. In the case of MEM relays, wires are connected when the switch closes causing the two wires to mechanically touch. When the relay opens, the two wires mechanically separate, which breaks their electrical connection .  The pair of wires that a MEM relay connects or disconnects are called the source and the drain. The pair of wires that carry the control signal are called the gate and the body. (If these names seem...