swehrwein at cs.cornell.edu

PhD candidate in computer science at Cornell University

Research Areas: vision, graphics, and machine learning

Advisors: Noah Snavely and Kavita Bala

Documents: CV | Teaching Statement | Research Statement

More information below on teaching and research activities

News:

2017-02-16: I've released code and a new project page for our Video Segmentation paper!
2017-10-15: I am on the job market! I'm looking for a faculty position at a primarily undergraduate institution. See the links above for my CV, teaching, and research statements, and please get in touch with any questions.
2017-08-26: I'll be presenting Video Segmentation with Background Motion Models at BMVC in London in September.
2017-01-20: I will be co-teaching CS2110, OOP and Data Structures, with David Gries this semester.

Teaching

Photons to Filters: The Science behind Digital Photography

Instructor

Spring 2017

I developed and taught a short course on the scientific ideas powering digital photography to AP Physics students at Ithaca High School. I taught the course over three days to three different classes of about 20 students each. The sessions covered light transport, optics, digital sensors, and image processing. I developed an interactive lab activity for each session to give students hands-on experience. Course materials are available upon request.

CS2110: OOP and Data Structures

Co-Instructor

Spring 2017

I shared responsibilities for all aspects of this large course with my co-instructor, David Gries. In an effort to incorporate active learning techniques in a large lecture environment, I introduced the use of in-class polling using Piazza, which had previously been only used for online Q&A in this course. We found that this is particularly helpful in helping students recognize concepts they need to study in more depth. My other responsibilities included:

Giving lectures for 2110 (about 620 students) and the associated 1-credit supplement course, 2111 (about 100 students).
Updating, releasing, and overseeing the grading of eight programming assignments.
Developing new tutorial videos on Java language constructs and data structures.
Managing a staff of 42 undergraduate and graduate consultants and TAs.
Developing, giving, and overseeing the grading of exams.

This was a fantastic experience and I look forward to doing more teaching in the future!

Course Webpage

CURIE Academy

An outreach program for high school girls interested in engineering.

Summer 2015

Working with Noah Snavely and a great team of TAs, I helped run the research project portion of the 2015 edition of Cornell Diversity Programs in Engineering's CURIE Academy. 52 high school girls from all over the country (and a few from Europe!) spent a week at Cornell learning what engineering is all about. They spent each morning being introduced to a couple different fields of engineering, then spent each afternoon with us, learning how to do image processing in Matlab and working in teams to implement some really cool projects. I taught lessons during the first two days and supervised two group projects for the final two days. One group implemented custom photoshop-like filters and the other did live webcam face tracking.

Project Page Cornell Chronicle Article

CS4670: Computer Vision

Head TA

Spring 2015, Fall 2013

I managed a TA staff of 10, oversaw ports of two assignments to Python from C and the introduction of a new assignment on CNNs. I also gave a handful of guest lectures and held review sessions, office hours, and managed project grading. In Fall 2013, I held office hours, provided extra help sessions for a hearing-impaired student, and graded projects.

Course Webpage

CS6644: Modeling the World

Teaching Assistant

Fall 2014

I co-developed the course with Professor Kavita Bala, including topic/paper selection, assignments, and some lectures. Topics focused on reconstruction and recognition for building models of the world from relatively unstructured input data. We met with groups to guide their paper presentations and supervised their final projects.

Course Webpage

CS4220: Numerical Analysis: Linear and Nonlinear Problems

Teaching Assistant

Spring 2014

I held office hours and graded homework assignments.

Course Webpage

CS1114: Introduction to Computing using Matlab and Robotics

Teaching Assistant

Spring 2013

I was responsible for designing and running weekly lab sections in which students engaged in fun programming activities that related to concepts covered in the main part of the course. Activities included demosaicing, graph traversal, frequency analysis and the Fourier transform, and the Game of Life. I developed a number of the activities from scratch, and improved existing activities for some. I also held office hours and graded projects.

Course Webpage