Dragons, Robots, and Snakes.
Or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Michael J. Ciaraldi
Professor of Practice, CS Dept., WPI

Friday April 14, 2006
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

During the summer of 2005 I was lucky enough to participate in three different trips which combined two of my interests, robotics and programming languages. First I attended an NSF-sponsored workshop at Duke University on the Alice environment. This is designed as an easy, fun way to introduce young students to programming. It allows them to quickly develop complex 3-D graphical worlds, and manipulate the things in these worlds under program control. The system comes with many pre-built models, so you can have a dragon flying around flapping his wings after an hour of instruction. The programming language itself is currently object-based, with full inheritance and polymorphism planned for a future release. Then I spent a week in Japan, on a trip organized by the Japanese government. We met with industrial and academic researchers, stopped in at the World's Fair in Nagoya, and attended the international Robocup soccer competition. Finally, I attended another NSF workshop at Swarthmore College, on Python Robotics. Here we learned how to program robots in the Python language. The Pyrobotics system runs on several platforms, both simulated and physical. There's nothing like chasing a hundred-pound robot as it rolls down the corridor successfully (or unsuccessfully) avoiding obstacles. The colloquium will be illustrated with live software demonstrations, photos, and video.

Mike Ciaraldi has been a Professor of Practice in the Computer Science Dept. at WPI since 1999. Before that, he designed telecommunications and process control systems for Lucent Technologies. He also ran a one-man consulting business with clients such as IBM, Xerox, and Eastman Kodak. In his spare time, he taught at RIT, Clark, and the University of Rochester. His technical interests include robotics, networking, personal computing, and software engineering. Personal interests include science fiction, comics, and theater. He wrote his first program in FORTRAN II, for an IBM 1620, on punch cards, in 1967.

Host: Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.