CMU Essay: Interests

Choosing a primary interest of research at CMU is like trying to choose what to eat a fine restaurant. You know that anything and everything will be delicious. Even the food you don't like will be delicious.

I really liked the multi-robot research. I think that will be the future of space exploration. Instead of a singular billion dollar machine. Send 1,000 machines or 10,000 machines. Then let them be automated and let them determine the most efficient way to map a location, to check the composition of the soil, and to get the needed experimental results.

What I'm curious about is how do you allow the system to account for partially disabled robots? How do you account for robots with different equipment sets and different abilities. Especially if those abilities overlap in some manner.

A less robotic interest is an adaptive system where default behavior is altered based on time of day, day of week, and calender day. This would be cross referenced with historical data. An example would be a stop light that learns to favor east bound traffic in the morning, west bound traffic in the evening, and north south traffic when a special event is detected. In theory this light would continue to adapt it's timing as it's environment changed.

Good and Bad Deeds (an incomplete thought)

If you follow Christ's example and keep the Father in mind while doing an action, then that action is a good deed. But if you do not have the Father in mind, then your actions are bad deeds no matter how much they benefit man. For we were not put on this earth to benefit man, but to benefit God.

This is just a first thought. It doesn't really provide insight into how Christ helps us and the purpose of the Holy Spirit. And it says nothing about how we can contort what the Father really has in mind into what we actually want. It's really easy to say "God wants me to be happy so I'm going to steal something." Part of keeping the Father in your mind is to remember that this world is insignificant (the people in it are not).