Alumnus Noel Naughton ’10 returned to Trinity today to share his work on the CyberOctopus project with current students!
Naughton is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, and is part of a team developing a robotic “octopus” that adapts, learns, and evolves to novel tasks, situations and environments.
What about Noel’s Trinity education prepared him for this research? “Stop me if you’ve heard this before: sense of wonder and depth of inquiry,” he says, specifically the formation he experienced in Humane Letters.
He also cited programming with MATLAB at Trinity as a great prerequisite for Python, the programming language he uses for robotics.
Naughton’s talk was part of Trinity’s regular Lecture and Performance Series, a program that brings the very best in thought and artistic performance before our students. Stay tuned for the next event in the series…parents and guests are invited to attend!