personal statement take 4

When I was a little girl, about 5 years old, my father brought home a Nintendo Entertainment System. Through a sequence of buttons, I could immerse myself into another world, tackling adventures and adversity that my imagination was not yet sophisticated enough to construct on its own.  At that age, my means of interaction was not exclusively through spoken dialects. On top of juggling the languages of two cultures, I began to study the artistic expressions of music.  The cognition of communication flourished in my early childhood, and although it seemed to be thoughtless leisure at the time, the 8-bit processor that ran in my living room began training me to understand the digital interaction between my analogue precision and its 7-pin controller. Through a meager collection of capacitors and resistors, my childhood pastime allowed me to see the world in ways that real life restricted, not that my actions did not yield consequences, but that I could always go back and discover the correct way of doing things.  Since I was not able to understand the science behind the stimuli, these virtual realities sparked a life-long curiosity on whether machine could intelligibly interact with man.

As a University of Delaware 2003 Science and Engineering Scholar, I worked as a team member with a number of graduate programmers on a Mobil Ad Hoc Networking simulator for military operations.  Under the direction of Dr. Stephan Bohacek, professor of computer engineering, I was given the role of researching military operations, working with OpenGL to efficiently create a way of producing urban areas, and helping to determine a conventional way for nodes to mobilize in such an environment.  Although the Internet has introduced an ever-increasing amount of information to the fingertips of millions, it is confined to the limits of wired communication; long overdue, the next stage of this information, communication, and computation explosion will inevitably come with the deployment of Mobile ad hoc Networking—MANETs, impacting on every apparent aspect of life.  It was the central goal of our work to advance the performance of such wireless networks.

For the first time in my undergraduate studies, I was challenged to apply my acquired knowledge in computers towards solving a much bigger problem.  Research has encouraged me to aspire a graduate degree, leading me to the Ronald McNair Scholar Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. Through the McNair Program, I took on a more independent study with Professor Richard Hanley, of the Philosophy department.  Although my project, “The Aesthetics of Jazz,” seemed to be no more than a breadth experience to investigate my stretch of interests, I began to realize the correlation between my passions of music and computers.  This has led me to conclude that jazz, more than mere music, is like a language of its own culture; similarly, computer science is the study of communicating logic.  In addition, my work in computer science is balanced with philosophical meanderings, giving me insight into the types of worlds and realities that I might one day (re)create through applied artificial intelligence.

I am just beginning to scratch the surface of the artificial intelligence anomaly, including my childhood infatuation with it.  In particular, I am interested in Dr. Michael Lewis’s investigation of Human-Agent Interactions and Game Engines in Research. I believe that adversity and experience build character; however, the realm of interaction is not exclusively person to person.  Novels and movies trigger profound ideas and emotions, but so much is left for its audience to pursue.  The uncharted possibilities of virtual reality would be a fruitful area of research, because of the intellectual taboo that overlooks video games.   This under-explored idiom can potentially express literary genius and cinematic masterpiece through the creative development of AI and VR.  With computer science as my medium for inducing progress, I hope to develop a means for effectively communicating revolutionary ideas.