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CUE 2004

COMPUTER SCIENCE
Student Profile: Thomas Strohmann

Thomas Strohmann

As a first-year college student, Thomas Strohmann remembers working with a team of students to program a computer to play Mancala, a traditional board game. "It was really fun and none of our group could beat the computer," he recalls.

It was then that Strohmann, a German student attending Darmstadt University, knew he had made the right choice in studying computer science. Now a Ph.D. candidate at CU-Boulder, he has been working on greater and greater challenges ever since.

A research assistant with the machine-learning group, Strohmann is exploring the algorithms and methods that work best for pattern recognition in different applications. He doesn"t know which direction he will eventually take his career, but he hopes it will be somewhere he can continue to pursue leading-edge research. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he had an internship analyzing satellite images, is one exciting possibility.

Other potential applications of machine learning include speech recognition software, fully automated planetary rovers and automobiles that can maneuver themselves in traffic, along with the whole field of bioinformatics, which depends on complex data analysis.

"Computer science can be an important assistive tool for scientists," Strohmann says. "There are many things we can teach  computers to do that we can"t  do ourselves."