Christian Moore, a senior majoring in computer science and math, had the opportunity to present his research project at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Southeast conference in November 2016. Christian’s project was titled “Finding the Center of the Universe”. His research advisor was Dr. Anil Shende.
Christian best described his project as imagining a bunch of people in a room walking away from each other.
“If everyone closed their eyes and stood at one point, then started walking away from each other, [then], at some point I ask you to open your eyes. How many people would you need to look at to find the center where you started? For this problem I designed an algorithm so that we could solve for the center in no more than four observations. I was able to show mathematically that my algorithm worked”.
Christian found that working with Dr. Shende was very helpful.
“While working, there are many different paths you can take to solve the problem, and sometimes you can find yourself stuck in one way of thinking about your problem. A huge help that my advisor gave me was reminding me that there are alternate paths to a solution. This really helped keep me from thinking that there is only one solution”.
Christian enjoyed his time at the conference.
“While I was there, I was part of the student research competition as well as part of the student programming competition. I was able to see the research projects of other students my age from schools around the Southeast. What I enjoyed most was talking to the various judges and visitors at the conference. It was amazing to see that the keynote speaker of the conference came by to talk with all the students that were presenting research”.
For anyone thinking about doing research, Christian says:
“Do it. As a younger student I was never really sure whether research or an internship was right for me, so I tried both. Now after finishing my summer research project, my only wish is that I would have started looking at research sooner. This summer of research was the driving factor for why I chose to continue on to graduate school after Roanoke”.