About Me

My name is Eric Holk. I am Computer Science and Mathematics student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. During my senior year, which officially starts September 1st, I'm going to be doing a thesis on peer to peer web search. The title I'm currently working with is "Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Web Search." Even though the school year doesn't start for another month and a half, I've already been doing some background reading and plenty of thinking about this project. I'll post more details about what I hope to accomplish with my thesis later, but this entry is supposed to be primarily about me.

I've spent most of my life growing up in the Seattle area. Rose-Hulman is in Indiana, so I spend most of the year out there these days. For the summer I have an internship at Sandia National Laboratories. The internship is going very well, and I'm having a lot of great experiences. I'm becoming relatively fond of Albuquerque as well.

Some of my hobbies include mountain biking, backpacking, camping, and snowboarding. Honestly, I don't get the chance to do these things very often anymore, but I keep hoping that I'll get back into it eventually. I'm also a pretty decent bass player, and I play some guitar as well. As far as my religious beliefs go, I'm a Christian, and an active member in the Church of Christ.

One of my extracurricular activites at school is the RHIT Robotics Team. Our goal is to build an autonomous helicopter that can complete the missiong required by the International Aerial Robotics Competition. I'm currently the project manager of the team, but for the summer I've passed many of my responsibilities on to Jacob Krall. Besides managing things and doing administrative stuff, I work on the flight controller, the ground station/helicopter networking code, and the simulator.

My main interests in Computer Science seem to be related to artificial intelligence. I took a course winter quarter in Swarm Intelligence, which I absolutely loved. The course is actually where I got the inspiration for this project. My other interests include graphics, programming languages, and probably a few other things. As far as how I actually use my computer, I'm a Gentoo guy. Of course I use Windows too, but I'm using that less and less as time goes on. Probably the biggest draw about Linux for me is how much of the guts are exposed, which lets me tinker around a lot more with it. With Linux I can make what in my opinion are some pretty creative solutions to various challenges, while under Windows I seem to be mostly restricted to just using the computer. Another interest is peer-to-peer networking, which shouldn't be surprising as I'm going my senior thesis on that. Of the peer to peer projects I've seen, I think the most interesting from a social and technical standpoint is the Freenet Project, although last time I checked the lag was so high that it takes a lot of patience to actually use it. One of the really fascinating things about peer-to-peer networking to me is how it intertwines technical and social issues. For example, Freenet is a technical way to fight censorship, which leads one to several moral and ethical issues to wrestle with. You have to decide whether you want to accept responsibility for creating a system that could aid rebels in overthrowing a government, or creating a system that's very use in some places is illegal and could cause people to be put in prison, or even put to death. Luckily my specific addition to the world of peer-to-peer networking should be able to avoid most of these issues.

Anyway, I think that's enough about me. Thanks for reading, and I hope to provide a lot of information on this blog that should be useful to someone somewhere.