Name: Christina Leber '07
Hometown: Orwell, Vermont
Durham, NH – Christina Leber likes a good challenge; so, it was only fitting that she chose to spent the summer before her junior year doing research through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).
Leber, a senior from Orwell, Vermont and a Computer Science (CS) major, teamed up with Dr. Alejo Hausner to research Accelerated Spatial-Directional Queries, which, as Leber explains, has to do with – on a basic level – storing a graphical image in a computer.
“Professor Hausner had this project going and I was intrigued by it,” Leber said of why she chose to get involved. “I thought I’d gain valuable experience with coding, and I could apply what I learned in classes to the project, as well as have an opportunity to learn new concepts.”
As Leber explains it, an image stored on a computer has a mesh – which is comprised of smaller pieces of the image that are individually stored. As part of her project, Leber wrote an R-tree that enabled faster searching for pieces in a mesh.
What is an R-tree?
“Take for example an interactive map, like something found on Map Quest. These maps can tell things about an area in excruciating detail, all roads, parks, forests, deserts, etc. They also can locate buildings by an address and figure out driving directions. Every single piece of this needs to be stored somehow so that the map can use this data,” explained Leber. “R-trees are useful for this, because they store each of these pieces and can access them efficiently, since it uses the same search algorithm as a tree. R-trees are also useful for storing graphical images, which are broken down into pieces.”
After observing Christina’s experience with UROP, Hausner says he wished he’d had such an opportunity as an undergraduate.
“It would have better prepared me for research in graduate school,” he said. “Grad school was a bit of a shock, because I suddenly was left largely to my own devices, without the weekly assignment deadlines that had motivated me and kept me on track when I was working on my bachelor's. The shock was not fatal, but it would have been nice to have experienced self-directed work earlier.”
Leber's participation in UROP took quite a bit of time, and she kept herself even busier over the summer working on a coding project for her parents’ business.
During the school year, Leber likes to keep herself busy as well. She plays alto saxophone in the UNH Pep Band and Clarinet in the UNH Marching Band and Concert Band. She’s also working toward a history minor.
UNH’s CS and Music programs are what drew her to the school in the first place. Although, interestingly, before coming to UNH, Leber didn’t have much exposure to computer science.
“My high school didn’t have computer science classes at all,” said Leber. “So I had no experience in the subject until my freshman year in college.”
Still, said Leber, while the realm of CS was slightly mysterious to her before the came to UNH, she found it fascinating.
“I knew it involved math, science, problem-solving and technology, which are all interesting to me,” she said. “And if I didn’t like it, I could always change majors.”
But Leber says she has no desire to change majors. In fact, her experience with UROP only reinforced the fact that she’s chosen the right major.
"The benefit of participating in UROP was being able to pull together everything I’ve learned so far – like data structures and software design – and refine it, apply it, get better at it and learn more on top of it,” she said. “And it drove home that CS is what I want to do; I did this not because I was assigned to do it, I did this because I wanted to.”
- Rachel Purnell, CS Department Staff |
