Guest lecture on the CyberOctopus project by 2010 Alumnus Noel Naughton

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!