My Mentor and I
Me -- Hello, I am Jackie Soenneker, the creator of this lovely website that you seem to be currently having the pleasure of perusing. In the normal school year, I attend Centre College, a small liberal arts college in the center of Kentucky, probably hence the name. This coming September, I will be entering my senior year at Centre with both excitement and nervousness. Excitement because, hey, who doesn't want to be a college graduate?, and nervousness because the end of my undergraduate career in May 2008 equals either a job or grad school, and I'm not at all sure which I'll be opting for at the moment. I'm a Computer Science major and Mathematics minor, with a great affinity for the former subject and generally just an aptitude for the latter. I have a bit of previous experience with robotics and AI, since I spent the spring semester and summer of last year helping my academic advisor at Centre with a sabbatical project of hers involving a Sony AIBO robot dog and reinforcement learning, and then took her AI class that fall. I find it very interesting being here at the University of South Florida in Tampa, especially since the furthest south I'd ever previously been was South Carolina. Much more sand than I'm used to! I can be contacted by e-mail here, and my regular website is located at www.freewebs.com/jackiesblite.My Mentor -- Dr. Robin Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL, which is naturally where my research experience took place. She leads much research in the field of robotics and AI, and in particular focuses on autonomous robots and their applications in search and rescue operations. She wrote a textbook entitled Introduction to AI Robotics, which was published in 2000, and is currently the Director of The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at USF. Much more info about her can be found at on her website, www.csee.usf.edu/~murphy.