Will Vining
I am a Ph.D. student in the Moses Biological Computation Lab under the supervision of Dr. Melanie Moses. My research investigates how the movement of agents affects distributed computation undertaken by those agents. For example, how does the movement of individual robots within a robotic swarm affect the computations the swarm as a whole can perform? I also provided technical support to teams participating in the NASA Swarmathon, a swarm robotics competition organized by the Biological Computation Lab.
I received my bachelors degree in computer science from UNM in 2016. Following that I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the High Performance Computing division. My primary work at LANL was on a peta-scale file system project called MarFS which was an R&D100 award finalist in 2016.
Publications
2019
- A. Aggarwal, D. Gupta, W. F. Vining, G. M. Fricke, M. E. Moses (2019). Ignorance is Not Bliss: An Analysis of Central-Place Foraging Algorithms. Accepted at 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems (IROS2019).
- A. Aggarwal, W. F. Vining, D. Gupta, J. Saia, M. E. Moses (2019). A Most Irrational Foraging Algorithm. Accepted at the workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA), 2019.
- W. F. Vining, F. Esponda, M. E. Moses, S. Forrest (2019). How Does
Mobility Help Distributed Systems Compute?. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
{more information}
2017
- J. T. Inman, W. F. Vining, G. W. Ransom, G. A. Grider (2017). MarFS, a Near-POSIX Interface to Cloud Objects. ;Login:, 42(1).
Awards & Honors
- NM Space Grant Consortium Graduate Research Fellowship for the 2019/2020 academic year.
- Best research talk, 2019 UNM Computer Science Student Conference.
Software
Software I write
Most of the software I write is avaiable on github. A few hilights are
- The Liquid Cellular Automata, a variant of a CA with mobile cells used to study the interaction between movement and computation.
- A distributed, eventually consistent, implementation of MAPElites
- My emacs theme, a dark color scheme with bright keywords
- I am currently developing an analysis library for photovoltaic system data called pvanalytics.
Writing about software
- Nonsensical errors with solutions that don't make sense.
- I have also written a tutorial on how to add a basic recruitment mechanism to the robots used in the Swarmathon.