While I was a student at UC Berkeley, my favorite classes were project-based Computer Science classes. Many of the projects were open-ended, so I was able to explore some interesting topics.
My larger projects have their own project pages. This is a collection of my smaller open-ended projects. (I didn’t include projects with specific specifications, as my projects look like everyone else’s in the class.)
CS184
Spring 2011 (2nd year)
Taught by Carlo Sequin. Worked with Andrew Lee and Chris Tandiono.
CS184, Foundations of Computer Science, taught by Carlo Sequin, was my first introduction to computer graphics. We were required to build a portfolio showcasing our projects over the semester. You can view the archived portfolio here.
CS264
Spring 2011 (2nd year)
Taught by Ras Bodik. Worked with Kaushik Iyer.
CS264, Programming Languages, taught by Ras Bodik, was my first gradaute-level class. As an open ended class final project, Kaushik Iyer and I created a visual Haskell editor, named HasView.
Our survey of the CS264 class found that advanced programmers generally disliked visual languages for the unneeded additional actions required to generate any actions - a simple program would take far more work to piece together, than to think about.
Our attempt at making Haskell more understandable at a programming perspective was to target these advanced programmers, so we decided that we would not follow the path and implement many small primitives for the language, forcing the repetition of many blocks, like an addition, but to allow arbitrary Haskell in a node, and simply provide an interface to visually program the flow of information through a Haskell program.
HasView was written entirely in Python, using PyQt for the user interface. (I learned PyQt during this project).
HasView operates on nodes with arbitrary Haskell written inside it, and specifying the input and output variables. We serialize the logic by determining an order of execution within each enclosure. We then resolve the variable bindings, assigning names to each intermediate output.
Our class report and poster are available, as well as a very hacky GitHub repository.
CS285
Fall 2011 (3rd year)
CS285, taught by Carlo Sequin, was a course about solid modeling. This class emphasized procedural mathematical geometric objects, with the intent of fabrication.
CS280
Spring 2012 (3rd year)
Taught by Jitendra Malik. Worked with Eric Tzeng.
CS280, Computer Vision, was taught bf Jitendra Malik. For our open-ended final project, Eric Tzeng and I wrote a depth-from-stereo program that took raw Lytro camera images and created a (noisy) 3D projection of the captured scene.
Our class report is available online.
CS283
Spring 2012 (3rd year)
Taught by James O’Brien. Worked with Grace Lee.
CS283, Advanced Computer Graphics, was taught by James O’Brien. Grace Lee and I created a FEM cloth simulation. Our class report is available online.
CS284
Fall 2012 (4th year/M.S.)
Taught by Carlo Sequin.
CS 284, Computer-Aided Geometric Design, was taught by Carlo Sequin. (This would be Carlo’s last class taught before his retirement.)
For my final project, I implemented and compared two smoothing tessellation techniques, Curved PN Triangles and Phong Tessellation, implemented as OpenGL tessellation shaders.
My class report is available online.