Just A Little Something About Me
My name is Christi Knapp and I am a rising senior at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana. My major is Computer Science along with a minor in Math if all goes as planned. I come from the small (and very German) town, population 2200, of Haubstadt, IN where I've grown up for all of my life.
I am a very family oriented person. I spend as much time with each as I can. I have a younger sister, older brother, 4 step brothers, 1 stepsister, and a new sister-in-law. I am also anxiously awaiting the arrival of my niece in October.
In January 2002, Dr. Hwang at UE emailed me the application to the
Distributed Mentor Program which I applied for. In March 2002,
I was chosen by the CRA to be part of a research
project at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. My
professors at UE helped me to decide to take this job and that it would be
a very good experience for me (especially if I go to grad school) My
assiged mentor is Dr. Judy
Goldsmith. She is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Kentucky. Her research areas include stochastic models, planning with Bayes nets and POMPDs, computational learning theory,and computational complexity.
The Project
I will be working on part of The Bayesian Advisor Project.
Specifically, I am involved in the POET - Online Preference Elicitation
Tool aspect of the Bayesian Advisor Project. The goal of the Bayesian
Advisor Project is to assist advisors to, imagine this, advise students.
There is a lot of theoretical AI issues involved, especially planning.
POET is a tool to aid students in eliciting their preferences about their
college career. Dr. Golsmith has descibed the project as:
The overall project will model the evolution of student transcripts as a
controlled stochastic system, and offer advice that optimizes the
probability of each student's satisfaction with her/his academic
experience. The preference elicitation tool will allow the student to
communicate the optimization criteria. We assume that the typical student
(a) does not necessarily know what's important to them; ( b) has
contradictory desires (a straight-A average, graduation in four years, and
lots of courses from hard professors, for instance); (c) does not want to
spend much time interacting with the preference elicitation tool.
Email:
ck38@csserver.evansville.edu