A side product of my daily work.

By day I am a theoretical computer science graduate student. That means I write proofs. I’m also an educator with some focus on diversity and introductory CS, and an administrator, and play several other rôles to boot, but the main one is CS theory.

As a theoretician, I don’t really have a topic I study in particular. I’ve worked on formal verification, robust control, econometrics, high-dimensionality visualization, multidimensional time simulation, obstacle avoidance, numerical analysis, computational geometry, and a little bit in computer graphics so far. But my current work deals with swarm robotics.

One of the things I wrote at work today was a little script for creating images for one of the papers I’m writing. The paper is to include a concept of “‍stay with the group by staying near your neighbors‍” (which has some problems I’m writing about how to solve). So the following illustrates what is meant by “‍near‍” and “‍neighbors‍”: “‍near‍” is shown in dashed lines and “‍neighbor‍” in solid lines.

You’ll need to click in the image before you see anything but solid grey. You can drag points around after you add them.

Incidentally, the solid lines in this image form (nearly) what is called a “‍relative neighborhood graph‍”.