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Evolving Ambiguous Digits
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…
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Blog Entry Ideas
I keep a bunch of text files on my cellphone that contain random ideas I get while on the go, categorized such as ‘Books I want to write’, ‘Funny ideas’, ‘Directives’, ‘Improv Ideas’, ‘To read/watch/play’. One of these files is ‘Blog entry ideas’, a collection of stuff I wanted to write or rant about but…
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Devices that Bruise
(with Alicia Grubb) For a Topics in Ubiquitous Computing class, a colleague and I were interested in helping people get out of being in a bad mood. Typically when someone is in a bad mood, it does not improve the situation to directly tell them. Instead, subtle feedback may be better. We created the concept…
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Improv Math: Military Clock
A few weeks ago, I went to see PROJECTproject, an improv show in the Toronto area. They had just come back from a tour to Western Canada, and one of the things they brought back with them was a structure called Military Clock. I think they said it came from Winnipeg. I’m always on the…
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Playing your part
One of the problem with video games that have a story component is that the player you represent can behave inconsistently with the “story of the game”. Games that do not have a story component, such as most Will Wright-style games, are the exception. An example of this problem is the very detailed story and…
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How can computers use tacit knowledge?
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…
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Stuck in Real Time
At Friday’s DGP party, a projector and a webcam was set up. The webcam was aimed at the party, and the projector was aimed at a large white wall, displaying the party. This is all good and cool, and if you aim the webcam so that it sees part of the projection, then you get…
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Mathematical Recreations – Tetris
So, I was doodling while watching an episode of The Wire, and I came across this curiousity. Let’s look at Tetris pieces, from the popular video game Tetris. Another way to define these is the set of arrangements of four squares where you can travel from one square to any other given square by shared…
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Teaching Origami by Overlaid Video
The motivation of this project was to teach novel gestural interaction to new users when static diagrams did not suffice. I recorded a video of myself making an origami boat. Then, I projected this video full-size back onto the same space. I brought in a few people to try to learn the process. The video…
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Implicitly Explicit
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…