After spending a day designing a gesture detection algorithm, I took a look down at my paper and noticed that it looked almost art-like, if you didn’t know the origin. I decided to humbly share them with you for your educational and aesthetic benefit, my dear readers.
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison This past year, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work on several projects that did not go anywhere. I started getting very discouraged when it was clear a project was not going to arrange itself into a nice paper-sized package, [...]
Someone on the Microsoft Surface team was nice enough to send me a project they were working on. Enjoy! What I really like about this “augmented tangible” idea is that not only can the digital visuals be changed based on what is happening in the real world (like Slap Widgets) but the Surface Monster’s internal [...]
Tommorow, Tuesday November 17th is my department’s Research in Action day. Think of it as a science-fair-like event, but without anu judging or prizes. Basically, its a chance for us computer science graduate students to show off what we have been working outside of regular conferences. The formal description of my project is: The consequences [...]
Most people are afraid of computers. Even something as gloriously inviting as the Microsoft Surface, which I worked on during my internship at Microsoft Research, has people interacting with it cautiously. At least this is what I saw in my user studies. My participants were mostly professional adults (read: the people who actually make the [...]
While working on 3 courses last semester, I got a head-start on some research ideas. When I was starting out, I was simply interested in the idea of “Miming and Mimicry” as an inspiration. After many discussions, I’ve developed further ideas, but still with Miming and Mimicry as the seed. Here’s the most tangible of [...]
Near the end of the first semester of my Master’s, my research topic was becoming clearer – along the lines of “teaching the use of gestural interfaces”. This was motivated by the proliferation of gestural interaction in devices of many form factors. Much of my thoughts on this were driven by my improv and theatre [...]
The above image represents my final Machine Learning project, Evolving Ambiguous Digits. I have just finished writing it now. Yeah! First semester of Master’s finished! More details are to come (I will likely make a project page). But the above is the output of a neural network as represented by a Restricted Boltzmann Machine, when [...]
I’m seven weeks into my Master’s, and the clouds are beginning to clear around my research topic. But first, an aside… In my improv class at Impatient Theatre on Saturday, there was a scene that was described as “incredibly complex”. We were playing with the idea of an “analogous scene” that explores and expands the [...]
For the last 15 years or so, the state of the art in Human-Computer Interaction, and Computer Science as a whole, has been riding the line between the explicit and the implicit. I am trying very hard to understand this. When we meet a new Thing, we apply very powerful algorithms subconsciously to figure out [...]