Another CSE student highlighted in the Jacobs School's #ILookLikeAnEngineer social-media campaign in February is Paul Epperson. A computer-science major and Regents Scholar in his second year, Epperson expects to graduate in 2018. He says he chose engineering at UC San Diego "because I wanted to be able to make real things. As someone with an interest in computer science, I had a desire to be able to design and create practical code that would provide useful solutions to applicable problems."
Epperson (at right) says his career goal is to "help design and implement software solutions for hard, science-based problems. The closer to outer space and robots, the better." His hobbies include going to hackathons, 3D printing, over-customizing his self-built quadcopter, and building his own parallel cluster of Raspberry Pi's for active web analysis. Meanwhile, Epperson juggles part-time jobs testing massive open online courses for CSE faculty, and at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, he writes code and builds hardware to be used in teaching high-school students how to build parallel computing modules out of Raspberry Pi's. As a freshman, Epperson also did research in the Qualcomm Institute's Engineers for Exploration program, as a member of the "Stereo Diving Rig" project in which he helped implement 3D vision for the stereo diving rig's Android-ROS tablet interface. The interface allows a diver to see images and sensor data streaming from the rig in real time, and enables them to control the parameters and settings of the onboard cameras to adapt to changing underwater lighting conditions.
Read the full interview on the Jacobs School of Engineering blog.