Greetings! I am Nathaniel Bird, an assistant professor of computer science at Ohio Northern University. Ohio Northern is a great school with a robust engineering program focused on providing quality education to undergraduate students.

I have taught introductory programming, introductory data structures and algorithms, microprocessors, operating systems, programming languages, and computer vision. I strive to keep my courses interesting, and focused on the fundamentals, so my students have a foundation on which to build their knowledge as they go out into industry or beyond. In addition, I endeavor to spark my students' creativity in my courses. Where possible, I do this by incorporating into my courses a large project that my students largely develop independently, with appropriate feedback. This lets my students explore applications of the course material that they individually find interesting, while simultaneously reinforcing the theoretical topics discussed in class.

I received my Ph.D. in computer science at the beautiful University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2009. My advisor is Nikos Papanikolopoulos. During my time there, I worked with the Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Vision Laboratory, specifically the Monitoring Human Activity subgroup. I spent the summer of 2010 back in Minneapolis as a visiting researcher exploring interesting applications of my behavior monitoring work as it relates to teams of robots.

My dissertation research was in support of high-precision, vision-based human body tracking. The motivating problem is the helical tomotherapy machine, a medical device that is used to perform conformal radiation therapy. To accurately target the radiation, the patient must be where they are expected to be. My thesis work focused on structured light systems, stereoscopic vision systems that use cameras and projectors for detection. Specifically, I analyzed how to place the components of these systems to achieve a desired accuracy, as well as how to precisely calibrate such systems once they have been set up.

Most of my research has dealt with vision-based human tracking and monitoring. I worked to develop a large vision-based human activities monitoring system for the Department of Homeland Security, comprising of over 100 cameras and many detected behaviors. Prior to that, I worked on a project to detect when motorists engaged in distracting behavior. Finally, I developed a system to detect loitering individuals in public transportation areas.

In summer 2008 and summer 2009, I was a program co-coordinator with fellow graduate student Duc Fehr for the Technology Day Camp, a free day camp program put on by the lab for underprivledged local middle schoolers to get them interested in robotics, technology, and college in general. We did many fun activities like programming using Alice, soldering together robotic bugs the kids took home, programming the Aibo robots to dance, and holding a "Robot Olympics" using the lab's Scout robots. In 2009 we expanded the program to three weeks. This program was a lot of fun and a very rewarding.