Nathan Backman
Whitworth College
MSC 3333
300 W. Hawthorne rd
Spokane, WA 99251

      I am an undergraduate in my senior year at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. I plan to graduate in May of 2006 from Whitworth College with a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Mathematics. I have been enjoying opportunities to do research since the spring semester of my sophomore year when I joined a project working on a clinical decision support system. That summer I stayed on campus as a research assistant and continued working on the project in which I improved the inference engine by dynamically creating and merging bayesian networks in order to create unique models for each patient that would allow us to classify their state of various kinds of shock. Since then I have worked on other research, a bit of an offshoot of my previous work, which entailed the creation of pseudo continuous bayesian networks. The networks are actually discrete themselves, but first passing the input through a fuzzy classifier gave me the chance to modify the a priori in order to better fit the data.

      More recently Whitworth College purchased a new telescope for their observatory and I eventually joined an effort to create a web based interface from which the telescope could be controlled. Users from the public can sign up on the web page for a slot of time in which they can freely use the telescope to take images.

      On a side note, I'm the president of the Whitworth ACM club. We take trips to various companies and conferences to get a feel for the computer world outside of whitworth. We have visited places such as Microsoft and Cyan. We have had paintballing events, hosted programming contests, and even work on group projects. Earlier this year we created a match making service for the Whitworth College community. Students could log in, fill out a survey, pay a fee and see their top matches of the opposite sex. We even have our own intramural ultimate frisbee team. We're actually in the processing of starting an intramural underwater hockey league. I'd have to say, and others would agree, that we've got the coolest department at Whitworth when it comes to students and faculty.