I came to Washington University in the fall of 2000. At that time, the department had no computer graphics, vision, or robotics research faculty. We now have five faculty, over a dozen doctoral students, a similar number of masters students, and a passel of undergraduates. We collectively teach a wide range of popular courses, including computer graphics, mobile robotics, computer vision, path planning, and computer games.

One of the decisions we made early-on was to think of the lab as a coherent unit, not as separate research directions housed under the same roof. We encourage our students to seek help from any of the faculty, and to help each other whenever possible. We run lab seminars (usually attended by all of the graduate students and some undergraduates) on a variety of topics. Although our research areas are different, we find that we all use the same basic set of mathematical tools and techniques. We also, as faculty, are willing to "share" students where it makes sense. For example, Rob Glaubius (Bill's student) is adapting techniques he developed for manifold-based reinforcement learning to the problem of surface fitting.

When we started, we had a rough time even finding student TAs that could grade our courses, much less have the background to do research. I spent a lot of time in the first year or so answering basic question about OpenGL, rendering, modeling, etc. There really wasn't anyone else for them to go to with these basic questions. Now, I find the students answering each other's questions, and I have no trouble pairing up new students with older ones to get them started (in fact, my older students usually initiate this adoption themselves). The two factors that have helped this are the undergraduate TA program and the BS/MS. Washington University pays undergrads to TA classes, usually classes they took the previous semester or year. This means that the TAs know the class material very well, and that students are comfortable getting help from other students. The BS/MS has allowed many of the undergraduates to stay an extra year and continue work on projects they started as undergraduates, resulting in a substantial Masters project or thesis.

Our lab's diversity has both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, having your closest in-house collaborators be in such diverse fields leads to projects, such as the robotic photographer, that really only come about because you're trying to bridge that gap. On the downside, we've had to boot-strap the lab up from scratch (our senior faculty are great, and very helpful where they can be). It's been a bit bumpy, but in the last two years I've seen the lab coallesce into a dynamic, friendly place with motivated students developing, and successfully pursing, their own research agendas.

It's a pleasure to see our senior doctoral students move into leadership roles, and to see how quickly our new students dig into their research projects. The department only accepts graduate students directly into research groups; as a consequence, we didn't get our first graduate students until 2001, with another year or two for them to work their way through the quals and beginning or advanced graphics/vision/robotics. We expect our first graduates in the summer of 2006; stay tuned!

Faculty: I started at the same time as Robert Pless, a recent graduate from the University of Maryland in the field of computer vision. My eventually-to-be-husband, Bill Smart, robotics and learning, joined us a semester later (he was still finishing his PhD at Brown University). Osman Burchan Bayazit (path planning and robots) joined us three years later from Texas A&M. Our latest addition, Tao Ju, computer graphics and bio-medical applications, joined us this year (2005).

The name: We settled on Media and Machines because, quite frankly, trying to find a name that fit all of our research interests was a bit difficult. But, we all use computers and we all use media in one form or another... besides, it can be shortened to "M 'n M" lab, which leads to lots of candy-related themes.

In the it's-a-small-world category... I'm the second PhD student of my advisor, John Hughes, aka, Spike. Spike's first PhD student was Philip Hubbard, who took a faculty position at... Wash U. Philip was here for two years before moving on to Interval and eventually ILM. I have to admit, I gave him a really hard time for moving to the "middle of nowhere...".