Undergraduate
Saint Michael's student receives $3,500 grant to study the computer science of "Clustering Algorithms"
"It's teaching a computer to see groups of things, the way we do," says Patrick Redmond
Contact Information:
Buff Lindau, Public Relations
802.654.2536
blindau@smcvt.edu
"I really like emergent behavior where many small things can make something unexpected happen," said Patrick Redmond, a Saint Michael's College senior from Strafford, N.H., who is exploring that situation supported by a $3,500 Vice President for Academic Affairs Student Summer Research Grant for an eight-week independent research project.
"It's a logical process whereby you take a bunch of dots and show a computer how to look at them, find the groupings and thereby make similarities apparent," Redmond said. His project, advised by Computer Science Professor John Trono, is titled "Studying an Exemplar-Based Approach to Cluster Determination."
The son of Patrick and Wen Redmond of Strafford, N.H., Patrick Redmond graduated from Saint Thomas Aquinas High School in 2006 before coming to Saint Michaels. Redmond is majoring in computer science and minoring in East Asian studies. He spent from December 2008 to June of 2009 studying Japanese language and culture in Japan.
"My work is designed to make a computer intuitively 'look' at data to automatically detect patterns and groups," Redmond said. "The method I'm focused on treats the data points like individuals passing notes, and through this process, groups preexistent in the data, become apparent."
"It's teaching a computer to see groups of things, the way we do, which allows us to apply those clusters to confusing data and large amounts of data," he said. You can use this process in photography to recognize people, in biotechnology to find DNA strands, where clusters overlap, and in other arenas, he said.
Redmond recently returned from a trip to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where he went with a Saint Michael's professor and another student, both of whom had previously been recipients of NASA grants. Redmond admitted was a "space geek" as a kid and always dreamed of working at NASA. He said he will apply to their internship program for next summer, as well as applying to graduate schools in computer science for the fall of 2010.
"This has been an exciting summer researching in computer science," Redmond said, who spent last summer on another research project. "It's also been challenging," he said. "I've learned a lot about time management and the importance of program design."
Professor Trono said, "These opportunities allow the students to integrate the knowledge and skills they've acquired from many different classes, and apply them to solving a problem they've never seen before." This shows them what they may be doing after they graduate. "Personally, I also benefit from their fresh views," he said. "They force me to rethink certain aspects of a project's initial design, and to consider additional functionality and/or experimentation as their projects progress."
Saint Michael's College is a distinctive Catholic liberal arts college that provides an education with a social conscience, producing graduates with the intellectual tools they need to lead a successful, purposeful life that will contribute to peace and justice in our world. Founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, Saint Michael's is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's Best 371 Colleges, ranking as 9th among institutions in Quality of Life and 2nd in Town-Gown Relations. It is one of only 270 institutions nationwide, and one of only 20 Catholic colleges, with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus, Saint Michael's has 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 200 international students. In recent years Saint Michael's students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Science Foundation and other grants, and its professors have been named Vermont Professor of the Year in four of the last nine years. The college is currently listed as one of the nation's Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings. Saint Michael's is located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, one of America's top college towns.
Buff Lindau, Public Relations
802.654.2536
blindau@smcvt.edu
"I really like emergent behavior where many small things can make something unexpected happen," said Patrick Redmond, a Saint Michael's College senior from Strafford, N.H., who is exploring that situation supported by a $3,500 Vice President for Academic Affairs Student Summer Research Grant for an eight-week independent research project."It's a logical process whereby you take a bunch of dots and show a computer how to look at them, find the groupings and thereby make similarities apparent," Redmond said. His project, advised by Computer Science Professor John Trono, is titled "Studying an Exemplar-Based Approach to Cluster Determination."
The son of Patrick and Wen Redmond of Strafford, N.H., Patrick Redmond graduated from Saint Thomas Aquinas High School in 2006 before coming to Saint Michaels. Redmond is majoring in computer science and minoring in East Asian studies. He spent from December 2008 to June of 2009 studying Japanese language and culture in Japan.
"My work is designed to make a computer intuitively 'look' at data to automatically detect patterns and groups," Redmond said. "The method I'm focused on treats the data points like individuals passing notes, and through this process, groups preexistent in the data, become apparent."
"It's teaching a computer to see groups of things, the way we do, which allows us to apply those clusters to confusing data and large amounts of data," he said. You can use this process in photography to recognize people, in biotechnology to find DNA strands, where clusters overlap, and in other arenas, he said.
Redmond recently returned from a trip to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where he went with a Saint Michael's professor and another student, both of whom had previously been recipients of NASA grants. Redmond admitted was a "space geek" as a kid and always dreamed of working at NASA. He said he will apply to their internship program for next summer, as well as applying to graduate schools in computer science for the fall of 2010.
"This has been an exciting summer researching in computer science," Redmond said, who spent last summer on another research project. "It's also been challenging," he said. "I've learned a lot about time management and the importance of program design."
Professor Trono said, "These opportunities allow the students to integrate the knowledge and skills they've acquired from many different classes, and apply them to solving a problem they've never seen before." This shows them what they may be doing after they graduate. "Personally, I also benefit from their fresh views," he said. "They force me to rethink certain aspects of a project's initial design, and to consider additional functionality and/or experimentation as their projects progress."
Saint Michael's College is a distinctive Catholic liberal arts college that provides an education with a social conscience, producing graduates with the intellectual tools they need to lead a successful, purposeful life that will contribute to peace and justice in our world. Founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, Saint Michael's is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's Best 371 Colleges, ranking as 9th among institutions in Quality of Life and 2nd in Town-Gown Relations. It is one of only 270 institutions nationwide, and one of only 20 Catholic colleges, with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus, Saint Michael's has 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 200 international students. In recent years Saint Michael's students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Science Foundation and other grants, and its professors have been named Vermont Professor of the Year in four of the last nine years. The college is currently listed as one of the nation's Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings. Saint Michael's is located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, one of America's top college towns.
