Isaac Rudnick

Undergraduate thesis. Tests whether introducing a simulated 4-DoF arm's sensors in a developmental order, as animals' senses come online, speeds up reinforcement learning. Against all-sensor and random-dropout baselines across three task phases (PPO, PyBullet), the ordered curriculum trained about 4x faster early on with matched final success.

A serial communication and control framework bridging Python and Arduino for robotics research: PWM servos, stepper drivers, and sensors through modular classes, so new components need minimal code on either end. Its showcase application, VectorPlotter, draws SVG images on a whiteboard; Vassar's robotics lab forked both and installed a plotter.

Six simulations for a 16×16 WS2812B LED matrix on an ESP32 (Game of Life, Langton's Ant, Brian's Brain, fire, rain, sleep) on a custom KiCad PCB with five buttons and a 3D-printed enclosure; state persists in EEPROM. An alternative fork has an RTC-powered sloth tamagotchi.

Shows real-time blood glucose from the Nightscout API on a 32×8 WS2812B matrix driven by an ESP32. Custom 3D-printed enclosure with a diffuser grid, brightness profiles, and day/night modes; an open-source alternative to commercial displays.

A browser-based experiment testing whether losing control narrows attention and whether high stakes make it worse, using a Frogger-style task with interruptions. Designed and run with Jackson Chidiac, Irene Kim, and Beatrice Messaris at Vassar, spring 2025.

Finds moments when several insiders at the same company buy their own stock on the open market around the same time, using SEC Form 4 filings, and scores each cluster. A backtester tries strategies built on those events.