School

  1. Educational History
  2. Output

I'm always learning and studying, but here's some info from my formal school days.

1. Educational History

College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA
1991-1995
Bachelor of Science in May 1995
Computer Science major
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
1997-1999
Master of Computer Science in August 1999
Research Advisor: Jim French
Teaching Advisor: Kevin Sullivan

2. Output

Trav's UVa pages
I recently revamped my UVa pages. Enjoy!
Trav's old UVa home page
If you think my current UVa page is bad, you should see what I before! I was compelled (either by myself, friends, or advisors) to get rid of it. It wasn't "professional" enough. Hmph!
Information Retrieval
My main area of research was IR. You know, search engines. I like to organize stuff, so it was a nice match. I learned lots of PERL. I also learned that indexing large libraries is incredibly slow, even on university computers! Many late nights were spent baby-sitting IR runs.
Intelligent Agents
Overview and notes about agents. I started getting into this stuff for my IR research. I even went to a conference. I lost interest as soon as I left school.
Neural Networks
Back before grad school I read a book about fuzzy logic and adaptive programming. It was cool. I went to grad school hoping I'd become really good at the stuff. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much use for it in the real world, and little interest within academia. I managed to sneak it into a couple projects for classes.
Self-Printing Programs
We had to write some quines (self-printing programs) for CS661 Algorithms. Here's my stabs. Mine certainly aren't the shortest, but I've seen them copied around the web, so they must be at least interesting.
Software Engineering
Lots of projects in this class (CS685)! Of all the classes I took in college and grad school, this one was the most useful. We even had to work in teams, just like in the real world.
Tea Time
I used to be the "Tea Time Tsar", which meant I was responsible for hosting a late afternoon snack every Friday. My unique contributions were the instructions and hints page and the hosting schedule.
Teaching Assistant Issues
If you are thinking about being a TA, here are some points for you to ponder. I wrote these for CS201, but the issues apply to any CS class.