Mar 06, 2005 - Claremont, Calif. -

Senior computer science major Kamil Wnuk was recognized for the best undergraduate research presentation at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) annual symposium in St. Louis, Mo., on Saturday, Feb. 25, 2005.

The award, which included a $500 cash stipend, was for Wnuk's presentation, "Dense 3-D Mapping with Monocular Vision." The Harvey Mudd College (HMC) senior is a computer science major whose work includes the development of environmental representations and algorithms to improve spatial reasoning in robots. He was one of 15 undergraduate students who were invited to the symposium based on abstracts they submitted about their research. From among those 15, he was selected to make a presentation about his research, which in turn garnered him the prize.

"We have chosen to investigate how we can improve on current spatial reasoning algorithms," Wnuk said, "by representing the world the robot travels through as a 3-D map -- consisting of a set of planes, each with an image mosaic textured on its surface. To construct these maps from the sequence of images that the robot sees, I have developed a pipeline of tools called the World Acquisition Robotics Toolkit (WART). Recently we have managed to leverage the richness of our representation to improve upon the widely-used Monte Carlo Localization algorithm (MCL). Our new augmented version, which we call Monte Carlo Correction, promises to be faster and more efficient than the original."

Wnuk has worked on his research with Professor Zachary Dodds in the Department of Computer Science at HMC. "Kamil gave a presentation I would have been proud to give at any conference," Dodds said. "He is an outstanding researcher; not only for his work, but also for his perspective on and communication of that work."

Wnuk, who will graduate from Harvey Mudd College in May 2005, plans to attend graduate school and earn his Ph.D. in computer science.