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2004 Division III Projects

Evolving 'Virtual Witches and Warlocks'
Hampshire Student Uses J.K. Rowling’s Quidditch
as Basis for Artificial Intelligence Experiment

Raphael Crawford-Marks Raphael Crawford-Marks

Although enrolled in Hampshire College, not Hogwarts Academy, Raphael Crawford-Marks has spent the past year fine-tuning his Quidditch skills. Crawford-Marks—set to graduate on May 22—has created a computerized version of the rapid-fire game played by young witches and warlocks in J.K. Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels. But Crawford-Marks is doing far more than playing a video game: he’s running an artificial intelligence experiment that involves computerized generation of teams that either proceed in competition or fall by the wayside according to their ability to adapt to the Quidditch environment.

Put simply, teams evolve rather than being hand coded into the computer. Players are never directly told what to do. In Darwinian terms, teams learn what behavior is desirable by surviving and their desirable traits get passed along in the evolutionary process.

In Crawford-Marks’ project, titled “Virtual Witches and Warlocks: Computational Evolution of Teamwork and Strategy in a Dynamic, Heterogeneous and Noisy 3-D Environment,” two separate computer programs talk to one another. One is a Quidditch simulator with a built-in fitness function that evaluates each team’s performance and likelihood to produce sought-after results, such as scoring a goal. A smaller program generates teams one by one—setting up players in roles as chasers, beaters and seekers—and passes them into the game. Those who perform well survive to play another day and their desirable traits pass on to following generations.

In order to graduate, every Hampshire College student must complete a yearlong independent project and thesis, called the Division III. Crawford-Marks picked his Quidditch project after a classroom comment by computer science professor Lee Spector, who suggested during a seminar on evolutionary computation that Quidditch could pose an interesting artificial intelligence problem. Spector and two of his former students had presented a paper on the pedagogical possibilities of virtual Quidditch as a “challenge problem” at the 2001 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. For Crawford-Marks, who had taken two years off from college to work as a computer programmer in his hometown of San Francisco and whose other academic interests are film and creative writing, it sounded like the perfect problem and he ran with the idea.

Crawford-Marks became a fan of the Harry Potter books after he got interested in the challenge Spector posed. He read them for the first time last year, in Spanish while studying in Spain.

Rowling need fear no encroachment on her copyrighted territory: Crawford-Marks is using Quidditch only as an academic project and is being scrupulous in his documentation.

He is similarly careful in documenting the work of others. He is indebted to RoboCup soccer, which uses soccer as a model for the evolution of teams of cooperating agents and is considered a benchmark in artificial intelligence. “Virtual Witches and Warlocks” pushes past some limitations in RoboCup, which runs at real time, with one second in the game equivalent to one second in real life. Fittingly for Quidditch, Crawford-Marks’ project must run much faster than real time in order for the programs to evaluate the hundreds to possibly thousands of players necessary for successful evolution.

“Virtual Witches and Warlocks” is built on a simulation environment called Breve, the Division III creation of another former Spector student named Jon Klein. And, the Quidditch-playing programs are constructed in a computer language called Push, invented by Spector, and developed further by Spector, Klein and another Hampshire professor, Chris Perry, who works in computer animation.

Crawford-Marks now calls his earliest work “kiddy Quidditch,” as it evolved teams that played like he thinks six-year-olds might. But, now well past the 50th generation it starts to look a little more like Rowling’s game, with a practically uncatchable Snitch.

He hopes to present a paper about his project at the next Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, along with his mentor Spector. Spector chairs the Hampshire faculty committee overseeing Crawford-Marks’ academic work, and the Quidditch project is running on a big “Beowulf-style” cluster computer funded through a National Science Foundation grant to Spector, who was one of six professors nationwide recognized last year by the NSF as Distinguished Teaching Scholars. Computer science professor Jaime Davila is also on Crawford-Marks’ faculty committee.

In addition to being a lot of fun, the Quidditch project enabled Crawford-Marks to master a range of computer science skills—development, design, programming, data analysis—and integrate them into a coherent research program. At the same time, he explored processes of co-evolution, genetic representation and evolution of teamwork.

Now that he’s become an artificial intelligence wizard, Crawford-Marks plans to attend graduate school in computer science in a couple of years, but in the meantime will pursue creation of life in a slightly different form by working on his creative writing.

Virtual Quidditch Challenge Problem>>
“Virtual Quidditch: A Challenge Problem for Automatically Programmed Software Agents,” by Lee Spector, Ryan Moore and Alan Robinson in Late-Breaking Papers of GECCO-2001, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

 Nutritional Correlations to Cervical Cancer?
'The Epidemiology and Political Economy of Cervical Cancer in El Salvador'

Juno Obedin-Maliver Juno Obedin-Maliver

Within the next two minutes a woman will die of cervical cancer. One dies approximately every two minutes, with 240,000 such deaths occurring globally each year, 80 percent of them in developing countries, with Central America among the highest in frequency. Most are preventable deaths. In its pre-cancerous stages, the disease is curable, and proper medical screening and care could save these women.

May graduate Juno Obedin-Maliver is committed to that possibility.

Her work as a pre-med student at Hampshire College has prepared her well to meet the challenges that lie ahead. An internship funded by a grant from the Civil Liberties and Public Policy program enabled her to spend summer 2002 in Mexico as an administrative assistant to a physician training local midwives to do cervical cancer screenings. During January Term 2003, she was one of 10 Five College students enrolled in a course on health issues facing women in developing countries, co-taught by Hampshire health science professor Elizabeth Conlisk and alumna Meriam Cremer (87F), an ob/gyn who leads medical missions to El Salvador.

In the January Term course, students traveled with Cremer and her organization, Basic Health: El Salvador, to the region of Chelatenango, where they assisted physicians conducting health screenings by taking care of such tasks as obtaining informed consent, chaperoning patients through the process, cleaning equipment, and keeping records.

For her Division III, Obedin-Maliver examined nutritional correlations to cervical cancer in another region of El Salvador. She first immersed herself in the literature, identifying three critical nutrients that may be essential to prevention—vitamins A and C and folate—and worked with her Div III faculty committee to develop a food frequency questionnaire to determine the presence of those nutrients in a woman’s daily diet.
 

 
She returned to El Salvador in December 2003, where in San Sebastian, “with amazing assistance from members of the Red Cross,” she refined the questionnaire by interviewing women in Spanish in their homes, asking about specific foods and portion sizes in an attempt to quantify the presence of the three nutrients over time. In January, Dr. Cremer, other physicians, and Five College students arrived to set up a temporary clinic. Obedin-Maliver completed diet surveys of the 500 women examined and treated, seven of whom were found to have pre-cancerous cells.

She spent spring semester analyzing data and charting how levels of daily intake of the three nutrients being studied may affect development and prevention of cervical cancer. A poster of her findings has been accepted at the 132nd annual conference of the American Public Health Association, to be held in Washington, D.C., in November.

Her 240-page Division III paper, titled “The Epidemiology and Political Economy of Cervical Cancer in El Salvador,” included a social science component, exploring why so many women continue to die from a curable disease. “The lack of medical infrastructure is the number one reason,” she said, “but political, economic, and social structures and historical attitudes play important roles, too.” She also included a section analyzing the ethical considerations surrounding international research, including her own.

The Hampshire faculty committee guiding Obedin-Maliver’s Division III work consisted of Conlisk (chair), director of the Population and Development Program Betsy Hartmann, and quantitative instructor Fatemah Giahi. Other mentors important to the project included Dr. Cremer, Mt. Holyoke College anthropology professor Lynn Morgan, and Paula Stamps from the School of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts.

A native New Yorker, Obedin-Maliver came to Hampshire already certified as a holistic health practitioner, and plans a career after medical school that will enable her to continue working in hands-on healthcare and community health. She plans to spend the upcoming year continuing her research in El Salvador.

For more on Basic Health: El Salvador>

 Student Researches Patterns in Blue Jay Vocalizations
“What do blue jays say when they wake up in the morning?”

Sarah Faegre Sarah Faegre

In Hampshire College’s inquiry-based educational model, student projects often begin with a question. For Sarah Faegre, that question was: what do blue jays say when they wake up in the morning?

From September through November, Faegre awoke before dawn and headed out into the fields and woods surrounding the college to record the range of sounds the birds make when they first rouse. She chose blue jays because they are ubiquitous in New England, and because scant research has been done on how they communicate.

“Most of the information about their vocalizations is contained in only three unpublished master’s theses,” Faegre said. “I compared what I had recorded to what they observed. I tried to make some correlations with behavior, as in, this call was observed during foraging and this call during mating.”

Faegre used a mini-disc recorder to capture the bird sounds and a light meter to record the amount of sunlight as the morning progressed. She also took notes on weather conditions and natural surroundings.

Faegre completed this work as part of a Division III in animal behavior. Every student at Hampshire completes a final, yearlong independent project and paper -- called the Division III -- in order to graduate. Each works with a mentoring faculty committee, and animal communications experts Mark Feinstein, a linguistics professor, and Ray Coppinger, a biologist, served on Faegre’s committee, along with retired University of Massachusetts professor Don Kroodsma, an ornithologist well known for his research on birdsong.

Faegre wanted to explore patterns in blue jay vocalizations, and she discovered they have a wide range. In the early fall, just before sunrise, they make what is termed a “jeer” call, the typical “jay, jay, jay” call. This call is heard throughout the day, but is most pronounced in the early morning. She learned that within the category of jeer calls themselves, there are wide variations. She recorded various other blue jay calls, including “bell” calls, which sound like a bell ringing, or aptly named “squeaky gate” calls, which are also known as “pump” calls. She also observed that blue jays often make various guttural sounds when congregating in groups.

Much of what she saw and heard supported existing research. For instance, she observed that jays send out a sort of alarm call to other birds when threatened by a predator. The birds group together and release slurred jeer calls as they mob the invader.

She found the family interactions among blue jays particularly interesting. For example, she noted that fledglings continue to beg for food long after they are able to feed themselves. She said there is great research potential in the area of bird cognition, how birds communicate, and whether, and to what extent, their calls are a form of “language.”

The project whetted Faegre’s appetite for further study, and she plans in the future to attend graduate school, possibly in ornithology or some other area of wildlife biology. She will spend this summer on a bird banding internship in her home state of Oregon, then head to Argentina to work on a horse ranch for six months.

Vintage Trailer Became a Vehicle for Learning
For a 'Boston Globe' article on this project>>

For her Division III, one student in the 2004 graduating class, 21-year-old Christina Salway, designed and executed a total renovation of a vintage recreational vehicle. She transformed the Covered Wagon-brand RV from its original 1950s concept of a house-on-wheels into a guest bedroom in a project titled "Examination and Reconstruction of the Traveling Home: Rebuilding the Recreational Vehicle, an architectural Division III.”

Her project began with a visit to the summer cottage of family friends Sally and Michael Moskowitz, an A-frame located just outside Port Jervis, N.Y. Showing Salway around the property, Sally Moskowitz talked of building small cabins for use as guest rooms so that visiting friends of the couple or their sons could be comfortably housed. They paused to look at an abandoned trailer, huddled for nearly two decades under a cluster of pines, as the owner mused that it might provide a starting point for the guest room project. As Salway envisioned creative ways to bring the RV back to life, she realized she had stumbled across the perfect Division III: Restoring the trailer would enable her to experience the architect-client relationship while still a student. Drawing on skills she had already developed in architectural courses and internships, she could convert a built environment into a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing living space.
 

 
The two women spent days cleaning out the trailer, scrubbing away mildew and evicting mice. A crack along one end of the roofline had resulted in serious water damage, with warped walls and sagging cabinets, but Salway—who decided at age six after changing the uses of all the rooms in her dollhouse that she wanted to be an architect—saw the potential in the spatially ingenious structure.

“If one ignored the decay, one could almost begin to visualize what the trailer had been like in its hey-day,” she said. “I could see the nostalgia well up in Sally and Michael. Lots of ‘do you remember this?’ and ‘…how this attaches here to make another bed.’ The excitement was palpable and it became clear to everyone what merit there was in restoring this trailer.”

Salway and her dad, Roger, undertook the task of getting the trailer safely to the Hampshire campus, where she could consult with the faculty committee supervising her project as well as have access to fabrication tools and specialists available to her through the college’s Lemelson program for student inventors and innovators. After fixing four flat tires and rewiring road lights, she towed the vehicle to Hampshire, where it sat outside the Lemelson shop while she worked on it throughout fall semester. In the course of the project, she would repair the roof, pull the kitchen, rewire, sand and paint exterior metal, remove decayed interior wood, stain and install new paneling, and lay a new floor.

Working closely with professors from Hampshire and nearby Smith College, Salway drew up conceptual designs. As she researched the history of recreational vehicles for the major academic paper integral to all Division IIIs, she discovered, to her surprise, that her project was part of a much larger movement, with restoration of vintage recreational vehicles quite popular at present. She hoped to blend the Moskowitz’s particular aesthetic with what she was learning about the conventions of RV design and restoration. She wanted an aesthetic flow from their New York City loft to their summer cabin to the trailer. She wanted the RV to feel like an extension of the family’s other living spaces so that “people wouldn’t feel they were being put up in a random trailer that had been plopped onto the property, but in a space that both felt and looked like the places they associated with the Moskowitz family.”

She presented three options to her “clients”: One had rich, deep-colored fabrics and dark, complex woodwork to reflect the antiques in their loft. The second was an austere abstract design that brought to mind the vast white spaces in the structure of the loft. The third—which the clients and architect-in-training rapidly agreed was the way to go—incorporated Sally Moskowitz’s collection of Arts and Crafts pottery, her inclination toward vintage fabrics, and softer colors that would tie the summer house and loft together. The vintage look would also maintain the integrity of the RV’s original design.  

 
To keep the space versatile, they decided on double-sided cushions, durable yet attractive fabric, linoleum floors with throw rugs for ease of cleaning, ample light for reading or socializing, and materials that would show the least amount of dirt tracked in from outdoors.

The new floor plan involved removing the kitchen. This was in keeping with the RV’s intended use as a guest bedroom, and conveniently solved the problem of the sagging cabinets while expanding both floor space and room overhead.

Hampshire art history professor Sura Levine chaired Salway’s faculty committee, providing valuable assistance on design questions. Colin Twitchell, director of Hampshire’s Lemelson program, helped her develop requisite technical knowledge. In the Lemelson shop, she learned to use a band saw, jig saw, and table saw, doing her own woodworking for the interior panels and moldings, including portions of the curved ceiling. Professors Karen Koehler of Hampshire and Gretchen Schneider of Smith brought architectural expertise to the committee.

Development of problem-solving skills is an integral part of the Division III process. True to form, Salway encountered unexpected obstacles and learned to handle them as they arose. When removal of the kitchen sink exposed a wheel well, she simply hid it with a gorgeous curved-front, antique oak dresser that she refinished after buying it online and driving to Ohio to pick it up—and provided much-needed storage space for guests.

Scouring flea markets and tag sales with her mother, Lynda, who owns Savoy Antiques in Minneapolis/St. Paul, she collected decorative objects fitting the trailer’s vintage look, including paint-by-numbers art, Arts and Crafts style pottery, and Fiesta ware. She used new material printed with vintage pink, sea foam, and magenta floral patterns to sew curtains for the windows, and sturdy canvas ticking in coordinating colors for cushions for the bench sofas and overhead bed. “The objective was to create an atmosphere of coziness in a space that could be perceived as claustrophobic. By incorporating simple patterns and warm hues in the fabrics, buying plush foam for the cushions, minimizing the trinkets, and being careful to stay true to the scale of the trailer, we planned to make it inviting without becoming overwhelming or crowded,” she said.

The entire project was completed at a cost of $1,605, less than even Salway, who had drawn up a projected budget of $2,300, had anticipated. She was awarded a $400 grant from Hampshire College from a fund available to assist students with their Division III projects. She and the RV owners split the remainder of the expenses. Her investment enabled her to complete her bachelor’s degree with a wealth of experiential knowledge in design and building that propels her toward her goal of becoming an architect. After working for a while in New York, she plans to attend graduate school in the field. For their investment the Moskowitzes not only derived the pleasure of assisting a young family friend in reaching her goals, but also gained a guest bedroom for their summer cottage that can comfortably sleep up to five people and is, in the words of Salway’s Hampshire faculty committee leader Levine, “something that everyone who saw it coveted.”
 

 

'Hello Again, Kent State'

Hampshire Student Writes About Memories and
Monuments: Kent State, One Generation Removed

“All witnesses of and players in a historical event are they themselves monuments. We are all, for that matter, monuments to our own lives and the era in which our lives occur. Michel Foucault wrote that self is written on the body. So too, is history, and also, within it.”— excerpt from Amanda Goldblatt’s Hampshire College Division III

Growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, Amanda Goldblatt lived in the shadow of the nation’s prominent Washington, D.C., monuments and memorials, so omnipresent in her day-to-day life that they became almost invisible to her. Another national marker also lingered over her childhood: her mother had been a student activist at Kent State when, on May 4, 1970, four antiwar protestors were shot and killed.

Nearly a quarter of a century later Goldblatt has blended these two significant childhood presences into a compelling senior project at Hampshire College. “Hello Again, Kent State” is a literary nonfiction project that explores the location of memory in a physical space, the limitations of physical memorials and the realization that human beings are themselves memorials to what they have witnessed even as memory is transitory.

Memories one generation removed came vividly to life for Goldblatt last fall when she visited Kent State, accompanied by her mother, and retraced the steps of that day 24 years ago this month. While she carried perceptions of the historical events of May 4 that she had gleaned from her mother’s stories, stepping foot onto Blanket Hill, the scene of the shooting of students not unlike herself or who easily might have been her mother, brought home the magnitude of the event and its importance to that era of activism and war. She felt a keen sense of connection, both because her mother had been there and because of her own awareness of being part of another generation of young people who now know another war.

Goldblatt and her mother made a second trip to the Kent State campus, by which time, she said, “it had become clear to me that human beings are living monuments to what they have witnessed. And that memory erodes over time.”

Goldblatt said some of the questions that drove her to write about Kent State were: “How is an event passed from one generation to another? How does memory deteriorate and what is important to preserve? And, most importantly, why should we remember? I think discussing issues and creating an exchange of ideas concerning an important event in history will lead to progress.”

Every graduating student at Hampshire College completes a yearlong independent project, called the Division III. Students work closely with mentoring faculty, but shape their projects and papers from their own intellectual, creative or social concerns and questions. History professor and Dean of the Faculty Aaron Berman chaired Goldblatt’s faculty committee, which also included writing instructor Will Ryan.

Goldblatt’s plans after graduating from Hampshire College on May 22 include traveling, finding a job and eventually attending graduate school. She hopes to write professionally.

 'I can't plant a rose in my own name'
It is not likely that many people who purchase a bouquet of roses think about where those flowers were grown, or under what conditions.

Through her Division III project, Zawadi Nyong’o (00F) learned that flowers grown in Kenya for the European market come at a very high price: the systematic sexual harassment of poor women, who comprise the majority of workers in the industry. Nyong’o, a recent Hampshire graduate who is from Kenya, returned to her homeland last year to do an internship with the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya, also known as FIDA-Kenya. Among other things, FIDA-Kenya runs clinics that educate women about their legal rights. During her internship, Nyong’o learned about the widespread problem of sexual harassment of women who work on the country’s flower farms. The daughter of a prominent politician and a journalist, Nyong’o is well educated and urbane, but had never heard about this problem before. She decided to investigate the issue for her Division III.
 

Zawadi Nyong Zawadi Nyong'o

 
Nyong’o talked to community activists in Naivasha, a town where the majority of Kenya’s flower growers are located. Then she interviewed women who work on the Naivasha flower farms and in greenhouses. “All sixty-three women interviewed complained and talked about basic human rights abuses they had experienced involving sexual harassment and violence,” Nyong’o said. “Supervisors and managers regularly make sexual advances on these women, forcing them to engage in sexual activities or take nude photos. They threaten that they will fire them if
they refuse.”

Nyong’o researched the flower-growing industry and discovered that it is one of Kenya’s leading sources of foreign revenue, employing some 50,000 workers in a country with devastatingly high rates of unemployment. About 75 percent of the workers are women, many of them young single mothers who work for the equivalent of less than one dollar a day. The women are unable to meet basic housing and transportation costs and are victimized by the advances of managers who promise overtime or transfer to better departments in exchange for sexual favors. Nyong’o learned that many of these women live in company housing projects, where apartment managers also frequently offer better housing in return for sex.

Nyong’o discovered that the problem, while not well documented, appears to be widespread. She also learned that efforts to remedy the situation are scant and inadequate, failing to address the complex cultural, political, and economic factors that are at play, in addition to the legal issues. Nyong’o searched library archives for news articles about sexual harassment of female workers in the flower industry; she could find only three written since 1998.

“These companies don’t allow women workers to talk to outsiders,” she said. “Anyone talking to a journalist or human rights organization risks being fired.” And because jobs are so scarce, particularly for women—some 200 wait outside the farms each morning to be hired as day laborers—few are willing to take the risk. Nyong’o herself found it extremely difficult to get women to meet with her and discuss the problem; eventually, she was able to reach them through meetings held in secret.

In addition, cultural norms within Kenya prevent women from speaking out. Nyong’o said anything having to do with sex is considered a taboo subject for discussion. While one women’s rights organization has approached the government about the problem, it has been brushed aside for lack of evidence. “The politicians say there might be a problem, but it’s not a collective thing. They claim there’s no evidence,” Nyong’o said. “But these women are young, single, poor, and easily exploited. And there’s a power discrepancy. All the general workers are women and all the managers are men. Top management is involved in these activities, so where can a woman go to complain?”

Naivasha also lacks any women’s rights organizations. A woman who is willing to lodge a complaint would have to travel to the capital city of Nairobi, losing a day’s pay in the process.
“There are just so many layers to this issue and it can’t be looked at in just an isolated way, say, through the legal system,” Nyong’o said. “The public has to engage in a dialogue. Sexual harassment needs to be looked at as gender-based discrimination with an institutional structure underlying it that silences women and perpetuates abuse.”

In addition, Nyong’o believes the government itself has an interest in protecting the status quo in the flower-growing industry because it is integral to the nation’s economy. Kenya is the third largest exporter of flowers to Europe. Nyong’o eventually plans to have her Division III project (titled “I Can’t Plant a Rose in My Own Name”) published in Kenya and hopes that it may prompt policymakers to further investigate the issue.

This article, written by Sandra Dias, is taken from the summer 2004 issue of Non Satis Scire, a magazine for alumni and friends of Hampshire College

 

 


 
 

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