Name: Laura Sevilla Lara

Dept:Computer Science

Year (Fr, So, Jr, Sr, Gr<n>): Gr1

E-mail:laura@cs.brown.edu, laura.sevilla.lara@gmail.com 

Want to learn:

I am not sure if the idea in this section is to describe my long-term objectives in the program, or if it has to be just regarding this course, so I will describe the former, and then include the latter in the following section. 

Although not definitely shaped, my objective would be to work on the research of developing new techniques, and tools for the study of medical sciences, especially for those including neural sciences and the visual system in particular. These would involve a good understanding of the neural system, the already used techniques, and the methods to manage the information: computation and visualization. 


Other goals for class:

Regarding this specific course, I expect to develop my formation in two ways: first by actually learning new, effective and useful techniques of visualization  (probably including perceptual matters); and second to improve my way of work, by training my abilities to communicate to people from other disciplines, my abilities to communicate at a higher level with my peers, and getting the maturity of carrying out a complete project. 

Role you would like to play in a project and skills you bring:

Regarding the role, I think that I would adapt to any of the positions (either the collaborator or author), although it is always pleasant to perform original ideas from oneself. 

My background has been in computer engineering, mainly in four areas: vision (OpenGl, machine vision), applied mathematics (symbolic calculus, numerical methods, neural computation..), artificial intelligence (pattern recognition, knowledge engineering..), and biomedical science (to be more specific, in the visual system).  

Relevant math classes taken (calculus, linear algebra,
numerical methods, signal processing, ode's, pde's, etc.):

calculus, linear algebra, advanced algebra (symbolic calculus), numerical calculus, discrete mathematics, statistics. 

Relevant science classes taken:

Other relevant classes or experience:
In the last year, I have been collaborating in a project to develop mathematical models for accurate artificial retinas. This included the study of the biological system (from the structure and physiology of the retina and its cells to the final perceptual effects) and the proposal of several mathematic retina - like models, using image processing techniques implemented in Matlab for its simulation.