With Ping Fang (Ventura Startup) and Ken Shannon (HAAS, CTO)
my remarks
Thank you for the opportunity to tell you about Computer Science at CI
We are a fast growing Dept– we doubled our majors to 400 in the last 3 years
We are starting a new engineering program in Mechatronics(Mechanical & Engineering) this fall– after years of preparation.
We have a program in IT, one Computer Science, and the new Mechatronics program. Also programs in Cybersecurity, robotics, and Game design.
We work with the local community: with IT & Manufacturing companies, with Navy, HTTF, and we started an Advisory Board consisting of heads of local business & industry.
To give you an idea about our work, I will talk about 3 directions, but there are many more:
Houman Dallali– Mechatronics– he was the first targeted Mechatronics hire, and he works in intelligent prosthetics. Cheap Controllers(Raspberry Pi’s) and 3D printers have revolutionized our field, but ours is still an expensive endeavor and we rely on the community– for example, companies such as Advanced Motion or Amgen have given us equipment.
Jason Isaacs– Swarmathon– Jason has a PhD in engineering from UCSB, like most of our faculty has years of industrial experience, but loves the University setting and has come back. NASA wants to go to Mars, and Jason and his student are participating in one aspect of that endeavor: a swarm of robots that will be released on Mars to collect raw components to make fuel for the journey back home. We took 3rd place at the competition at Cape Canaveral in Florida in 2017.
I work in Algorithms generally speaking, they are the snippets of ideas that become code that run your computers. But I also work, and consult, in Cybersecurity, and we have an ongoing collaboration with HTTF. Set up by the Secret Service and the FBI to aid local law enforcement in dealing with the sophisticated digital crime, they have a lab in Camarillo, at a secret location, and our students have worked on several R&D projects for them, for example SEAKER last summer.
Today I have brought two students with me Vlad Synnes and Samuel Decanio who will tell you a little bit about themselves, and a little bit about“Voyager” a project that we did for the HTTF.
