[awake]

In the brown undergraduate computer vision course one of the homework’s (or final project; my memory is a little hazy) was to improve the tracking of webgazer. People were pretty successful from what I remember. As an undergrad I didn’t think much of it but as a grad student I would be slightly mortified if undergraduates were improving on my current research for homework.

[samvaran]

That's not too surprising, tbh. Building the baseline solution or platform from the ground up is often the most difficult part, and by the end of such a project, you end up with a 100 ideas about how to make it better. But either due to time constraints, a "perfect is the enemy of done" philosophy, or simply the fact that you reach a natural crossroads and there are multiple valid ways forwards, you have to draw a line in the sand and release at some point. It's natural that there my be low-hanging fruit for some people to pick up and improve on for some projects, particularly if they have different end goals than the initial project had.

[dylan604]

Why? Someone smarter will always follow

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Not even just smarter; we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and every year the barrier to entry falls that much more.