UCSD COSMOS Cluster 1 - 2021 - Blue

Below you will find the presentations, Google slides, poster board, and demo.  This year's students participated fully online and blew away our expectations and set even higher ones!  We are so proud of everything they accomplished.  It took a lot of deliberation to select the "top" projects.  Congratulations to Vidhi and Carter as the People's Choice Award winners for their project "Motion Detection Using Python and OpenCV on a Raspberry Pi".  Additional congratulations to William and David as the Faculty Team Project award winners for their "Super Mario vs. Mode" project. Jennifer and Paul "Saving Hogwarts" Presentation Slides  |  Poster Board  |  Demo  | Play the Game * * * * * Vidhi and Carter ** People's Choice Award ** " Motion Detection Using Python and OpenCV on a Raspberry Pi " Presentation Slides  |  Poster Board  |  Demo   |  See the Code * * * * * Taylin and Elizabeth "Fruit Faeries" Presentation...

On Friday, Professor Sanjoy Dasgupta guest spoke about machine learning and how a computer can determine handwritten numbers. For example, the post office uses software which has to determine the addresses written on an envelope. However, not everyone writes the number 5 exactly the same. Some may curl more that it could be considered by a computer as the number six. There are different algorithms that can be used to most effectively and accurately determine the values.  Similar algorithms can be use to make connections/relationships between other things such as analogy problems (king is to queen as man is to ?). 

This week we spent time working with PyGame.  After learning about it and creating an example game, we were let loose to create our own.  On Friday, we presented our PyGame projects.  Below you will see our presentations and demos.  Congratulations the Faculty Choice Award winners Erin and Paul for their game "Magical Maze" and to the People's Choice Award winners David and Carter for their game "Battleship." Jennifer and Brad - PacMan -2.0 Slides | Demo  | Play the Game How to play - Use the arrow keys to move around *** Jocelyn and Heindrick - Snake Game Enhanced Slides | Demo  | Play the Game How to play -  Control the snake using up,down,left, or right arrow keys to either avoid hitting the border or the obstacles (didn’t have enough time to finish collision with obstacles) or colliding with the fruit to increase length and earn points. *** Sam and Shane - Battle through the Lands Slides | Demo  | Play the Game How to play - Use the right and ...

We like to work hard AND have some fun in our cluster. On Tuesday, we create skits to show off our creativity and goofy side. Be ready to laugh!  Presenting our group skits... Menaces to Society by Elizabeth, William, Brad, Tony and Linus *** Burrito Eating War Crime by Taylin, Sam, Joshua, Edward and Austin *** Henry Lu, An Autobiography by Carter, Heindrick, David and Shane *** The Separation by Paul, Iman, Vidhi, Jennifer and Erin *** "Break" Time by mentors Hannah, Han, Henry, Bella and John, and Shirley

  On Wednesday afternoon, Deian Stefan was our guest speaker. He is a professor in the CSE department at UCSD. His insights on cybersecurity helped us relate what security issues in the physical world to that of the cyber world. There are two main types of security – defensive and offensive. He spoke about the analysis and protection of computer systems in an adversarial setting. The main focus was the protection on confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a system against an adversary. A couple of the big tips we walked away with were use password managers (so you don’t use the same password for everything and they are complex) and don’t install too many extensions.

  On Monday, we joined with Gold cluster to hear from our guest speaker Geoff Voelker . Professor Voelker is teaches operating systems and software systems courses. His research is on multiplayer network games. We had the opportunity to learn about what happens behind the scenes in massive multiplayer network games. For example, when you play these games, you are actually playing a game in the past (around 50 ms in the past) and there are several different ways for the system to handle lag times, predictions and interpolations so that it behaves as we expect.  It was fascinating to find out how it works by sending the state of a player's game to the server and to the other players to make everything seem smooth and real-time.  Thank you Professor Voelker for answering our questions about gaming issues like cheating.