Collin Engstrom: GUI Solution to Heterogeneous Testbed Complexity

Collin Engstrom is a rising third year at Southwest Minnesota State University, located in Marshall, MN. He is double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science and is also pursuing a minor in French studies. While Collin finds both of his majors to be riveting, he especially enjoys those areas where mathematics and computer science overlap. One of his primary interests is in computer networking, for instance.

This summer Collin was a member of the SCORPION (Santa Cruz mObile Radio Platform for Indoor and Outdoor Networks) network testbed project. Along with a team of graduate and undergraduate students, Collin worked under Dr. Katia Obraczka at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

SCORPION is a heterogeneous wireless network consisting of over 80 nodes in the form of autonomous airplanes, helicopters, roombas, persons carrying briefcases, and campus buses. The UCSC campus spans over 2000 acres, making the communication between nodes intrinsically difficult and dynamic. As part of the project, Collin helped build nodes, wrote software that would manage the nodes from a central location, and also helped write a poster abstract on the project. This abstract was later accepted into the 2008 MobiCom networking conference, where it will be publicly presented in September 2008.

While Collin still has two years of undergraduate studies remaining, he is actively preparing for graduate school. He plans on pursuing a Doctorate in Computer Science and teaching in a college or university setting.