At Syracuse for one year I researched peer-to-peer reputations systems which included a lot of public-key cryptography, game theory, and a little analysis of the structural properties of the PGP Web-of-Trust.
After that I worked on Wireless Grid computing. The goal was develop a framework for nomadic devices (such as PDAs, cell phones and laptops) to communicate and coordinate with eathother. Unlike traditional grid computing tasks which typically include CPU, Memory and Databases as the shared resources, we added input devices, cameras, microphones and displays to the list of sharable resources. Our first demo applications included distributed audio recording (think 5.1 concert bootlegging), screen sharing (VNC wrapper) and the requisite Mandlebrot.
Finally was my honors project was on attractors in real-valued circuits. The idea was to model circuits and transistors as real-valued functions (AND = x*y, OR = x+y – x*y, etc) with loopback. The goal was to devise a systematic method for constructing the circuits to eliminate errors due to voltage fluctuations, noice, coupling, leakage, etc. Simply, even if there were flaws and imperfections in the manfucturing process (\begin{cough}IBM,Motorola\end{cough}*) the computation would be “attracted” to the correct answer.
Next I am worked at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, TX (somewhere I never thought I would live) for the summer. There I worked on automatic valley network detection of Marsian terrain. We were trying to correlate certain properties such as distance to network, drainage area, terrain features, and soil composition.
I have yet to get involved in much research at Purdue.
*Sorry, the Apple-Intel thing is still rather new
