The best Todd Hester fan site!!
About me:
I have a degree in computer engineering from Northeastern University in Boston. I was born in Chicago and grew up in Wrentham, Massachusetts. I am currently studying artificial intelligence for my PhD at the University of Texas in Austin. Intelligence and learning fascinate me and I am researching reinforcement learning and robotics. For more info on my research interests, see below or check out this page.
I have been going to New England Patriots games since I was 11 and I am a huge fan. I also enjoy playing ultimate frisbee and bowling. My favorite band is Talking Heads and I love the concert movie "Stop Making Sense". My other favorite artists are Primus, Herbie Hancock, and Gomez. I'm also a big fan of Seinfeld, I have a page on here ranking all the episodes and listing my favorites.
This website:
This is a website I first designed in college in 2000. There is a lot of old content on here such as random photos, stories, quotes, and projects. The parts that get frequently updated now are the rantings and Patriots blogs and the photo gallery. My rantings has any random thoughts of mine on various topics and the Patriots blog has my thoughts on the New England Patriots. I also have worked on lots of various projects of my own including an online chatbot, designing my own robot from scratch, writing a program to play a 3D version of the classic game Connect Four, writing a program to predict the scores of NFL football games, and trying to write a program to play poker. The sections below highlight some of the better parts of the website. Enjoy!!
Research
My research is in two areas: reinforcement learning and robot soccer. Reinforcement learning is a type of learning algorithm which allows an agent to learn through interaction with its environment. In robot soccer, we program robots to play soccer autonomously, forcing us to address the issues faced by robotics in general. I am a member of the UT Austin Villa Robot Soccer team, which won the 2009 and 2010 RoboCup US Opens in the Standard Platform League. I work on all parts of the code, including vision, localization, locomotion, and behaviors. Check out our highlight videos here or below! My research in reinforcement learning looks at ways to extend model-based reinforcement learning methods to work in larger domains, as well as examining the exploration versus exploitation problem. I would like to make curious agents that can quickly learn about the world around them. My goal is to develop such methods so that I can then apply them to soccer-playing robots. For more information on my research, please visit my academic website.
2010 RoboCup Highlights
Highlights of TT-UT Austin Villa at the 2010 RoboCup Standard Platform League competition in Singapore, where the team took 3rd place.
RantingsOn this site, I have always maintained pages containing my rantings. These include random thoughts and musings of mine on topics including technology, the meaning of life, politics, and the future. I currently have a blog where I post my rantings and I have transferred my old rantings from 2001-2004 to the blog as well. Here is the link to the blog: Here is the latest entry from my rantings blog: There was an interesting blog post on the NY Times today about an experiment that showed that the decisions of monkeys could be predicted before the monkeys knew they had made the decision. The part I found more interesting connected with my previous post on free will and how the ability to predict our decisions does not have to mean that we don’t have free will: |
PatriotsI am a huge fan of the New England Patriots. I went to every home game but one from 1993-2005. I currently keep a blog of my thoughts and opinions on the Patriots. In addition to that, there are pictures from when I went to the Patriots first Super Bowl victory over the Rams in February 2002 and other games. I also have scores from my NFL Predictor software. Here are the links: Here is the latest entry from my Patriots blog: The upcoming season is full of questions for the Patriots. They had one of the oldest teams in the league last year, and they’re trying to infuse some younger players into the team. They drafted 12 players last year and 12 this year. On offense, they’re depending on some young players to take up the 3rd receiver spot. They have 2nd year player Brandon Tate, rookie Taylor price, and new free agent signee Torry Holt. The tight end position is all new as well, with veteran Alge Crumpler and two rookies: Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez. Last year they were very predictable with their offense, almost always targeting Welker and Moss. This year, some of these new players have to perform to give Brady more options. |
Pictures I have plenty of photographs on my site, dating from when I got my first digital camera in 2000. I have lots of photos of my friends and stuff, but also photos of places I've been and things that I thought would make cool pictures. Over time, I've varied where I store my photos, so they're at the separate links below: |
Projects
I am constantly working on various projects. Most of the projects involve some kind of artificial intelligence, either controlling a robot, predicting NFL football scores, or game-playing AI. The highlight of these projects is a 3D Connect Four game I designed where the computer will look up to 6 moves ahead. This game is available for download here on the website. My robot diary contains every step of the process of designing and building my own robot from scratch. I also wrote a program to try to predict scores of NFL football games based on previous week's stats. Enjoy! |