Crash course, C-Spaces, solidarity

This week I continued on the crash course, which included getting familiar with how to use the Parasol Motion Planning Library (PMPL) code, and some reading on configuration spaces (C-Spaces). My mentors helped in getting used to PMPL, and in fixing and explaining bugs that were out of the intended scope of this stage of the crash course. I also read some papers on using motion planning to study protein folding and ligand binding, and while I do not fully understand these papers (especially the biology/chemistry heavy parts), I understand the basic ideas behind them and it helped me understand how applications outside robotics may look.

On Wednesday, following #ShutdownStem, our research group met to discuss what we as students can do to address issues of equality and improving diversity. Our conversation mainly focused on increasing accessibility of underrepresented groups, and potential outreach programs we can do. The remainder of the day we indiviudally explored these and related issues. I spent some time working on an idea to incoming computer science students hands-on experience with designing algorithms, in the form of creating an engine for a novel chess variant. I hope to provide an experience I wanted when I was a freshman in uni or senior in high school, and maybe even expose non-CS students who might be interested in algorithms but deterred by the syntax of programming. If I can get this project off the ground, then in the future after this is written you can find it on my website.