Circuit Tree

Here's a brief summary of my Circuit Tree. It's still in a prototyping stage but I'm quite glued to the idea.

My goal is to create a sculpture that encourages participants to interact with it and create collaborative art. Specifically I made the tree where each leaf, when touched, changes colors from an internal, bright LED . As all of the leaves are connected together, the tree can "shiver" when touched. Depending on how long an individual touches the leaf, the response can change. With 30+ leaves on the tree, this becomes a 3d interactive display - light bright 3.0 if you will. People can try to change all the leaves to one color or put patterns into the leaves. The tree then retains a history - why is the tree blue now, who did that?

As an additional part of my work, I measure people's physiological arousal - what makes them excited and frustrated. I'm planning on connecting my tree to wireless sensors that measure excitement. As a participant gets more and more excited, the tree changes colors. Perhaps, when calm the tree is blue, but as the audience becomes more excited, the tree changes red and starts flashing more dynamic patterns of color.

Academic Posters 2009

Imfar 2009
 Using Machine Learning can we separate children with SPD and ASD?

ACII 2009 
Measuring Arousal Almost Anywhere

Are you Excited?

Summer 2009- Spring 2010  with Dr. Rosalind Picard and Dr. Lucy Miller

Have you ever worked with a child and he just went out of control- running around, not paying attention, or just completely spaced out?  Children with ADHD, Autism, and Sensory Processing Disorder can struggle with this daily.  Many of these children I worked with could not go into a regular classroom as they would just "act out".  As you can imagine their behavior can devastate their self confidence and social life.

For my Master Thesis, I measured 85 hours of Electrodermal Activity  on both the child and therapist during hour long therapy sessions.  While, I am still analyzing the data, initial results show that some activities (in this picture swinging) are effective in lowering the child's arousal.  While this coincides with therapist's theories, this evidence can be shown to parents and teachers to help them understand how our behavior is linked to our internal state which can be controlled in fun ways.

The research I have done so far was included in the application for Sensory Processing Disorder to be a part of the DSM IV.

I worked closely with Dr. Lucy J. Miller and 5 amazing interns over the Summer of 2009 to make this project work.

Weekly Survey Measures in Clinical Settings

Fall 2009- Spring 2010  with Dr. Rosalind Picard and Dr. John Weisz

One of the hardest challenges psychological clinics face is determining the effectiveness of their interventions.  This makes being creative and trying new solutions a difficult prospect.  Working with Proffesor John Weisz and the Judge Baker Children's Center, I have provided technical solutions to their new endeavor.  The group hopes to have parents fill out surveys weekly reporting how their symptoms are doing.

While the concept is extremely simple, the challenge is to motivate busy parents to fill out the information.  I am supposed to enter my workout minutes each day and I hardly ever do that. How can we motivate parents to do this?  Using principles of Motivating Technologies by BJ Fogg, I hope to introduce new ways to motivate parents.  Simple solutions could involve having a picture that grows and changes each time a survey is filled out.  You can also compare a user's input to the average.

Unlike traditional engineering though, I hope to find solutions by working with parents who do struggle.  I know what motivates me but finding out what motivates them is my end goal!  By developing the solution off of real needs (instead of theoretical needs), I hope to find an effective solution to this basic problem.

Electric Zen Waterfountain

Spring 2008

To watch the video in action click here:

Carol of the Bells
or
Sonar Demo




Working with a group of 5, we made the 'mini-belagio'. Making an embedded system board, hooking up lights and fish pumps, and even sonar, we created an interactive Senior project.

People could control how the water moved based off of where they moved their hands.

The water and colors could also change based off of music.

This project began my passion for building art out of electronics.

High Speed Digital Design

Fall 2005, Spring 2006

Working with Dr. Melinda Piket-May, I spent a year researching electric magnetic wave simulations. I received: $1000 Learning Opportunity Grant and an $800 UROP grant to work on a programming environment for complex EM analysis. I used the LC programming language, which was developed as part of the CRAY institute.

Working for Hasbro, a toy company

Summer 2007
 
My dream job was to work at Wizards of the Coast, making games.

They held a competition where 1000's of people applied for one position. I didn't get it.

Then I asked myself, why not just ask for one personally, instead of applying.

I wrote a letter to the Vice President, and I got a response, I was hired.

Over the summer I helped develop flash script for the games. Instead of just hardcoding all day I was given the opportunity to design how the layout would look. I became an expert with photoshop, making icons for each character. I also dabbed into interface design figuring out how to make the game fun.

The strongest thing I took out of this internship is what it was lacking: service. I had so much fun, playing card games with the pros, being creative, living with my grandparents, but I never felt a sense of purpose. How was I going to change the world with this? That lead me to apply to grad school the next year.

Autonomous Robotic Control through BlueTooth

2005-2007

I began a research project to develop a robot that could be controlled wirelessly through bluetooth.

I applied for and recieved a $700 and $1,800 grant from the CU Engineering Excellence Fund

I Created an Embedded System to communicate with the robot working with a 8052 Processor and a bluetooth module. This robot is able to show emotions and due various actions. There are sonar/heat/audio/camera/servo motor sensors.

Overall this project prepared me for my Capstone project, inspired me to start a robotics club and got me interested in DSP.

Learning Assistant for CSCI 1300

Fall 2005

After finishing CSCI 1300 Computer Science: Programming I was invited to be a Learning Assistant for the next year class, in Spring 2006. This was quite a challenge at the time, as I had not taken any other programming course.
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The course I taught followed the curriculum of Python Programming. I worked under Dr. Grunwald, my mentor.

10 hours a week, I taught students everything from "for loops" to "recursive functions". This was additionally challenging as the students who I taught needed additional assistance and had very little foundation.

Using creative methods, I taught students new concepts by providing cognitive problems and paradigm shifts. Imagine teaching a student from Africa who can barely speak english how a for loop works.

By the end the students were able to make a fully running tic-tac-toe AI and solve the Traveling Salesman Problem using a recursive program in C.

Being a TA here fortified my skills in programming and ignited my passion for teaching. I still keep the relationships I made with the students I taught in this class.

Wireless Tracking through Robotics

Summer 2005

Working with Dr. Dirk Grunwald and Dr. Greg Grudic I spent Summer 2005 developing a robot to detect wireless internet signals.

• recieved $4,500 NSF grant for undergraduate research
• developed a planning and control system for the ER1 robot
• collected data to be used with a Nearest Neighbor Algorithm.
  
• helped show how individuals could be tracked through wireless internet signal strength

We used the nearest neighbor algorithm to predict specific locations where the robot would be. Our research showed that wireless signals bounce too much for precise location.

Through this research I bumped into many obstacles: the robot's direction was skewed on carpet, developing the interface, and analyzing the loads of data I received.


I programmed the robot to talk with people from remote text commands. In addition the robot could sing and dance which was fun to do while collecting data to unsuspecting prospective students.

The above data shows what my robot analyzed. Each one of these was one wireless stations strength, with over 200 actually being analyzed. As you can see the variablity of strength made the data fairly inconsistant. If I were to continue on this experiment, I would attempt to use more sophisticated machine learning algorithms (perhaps Randomized Forrests) to deal with the chaos of the data.

Math Quiz #7

 

Click Image for Video

Spring 2004

My Senior year in high school I began my passion for developing flash videos. In one day, which happened to be mother day (sorry mom), I developed the above movie. While I did not know how to code back then, this movie shows my love of bending Flash's rules and showing things in a new perspective. I created this movie to compete in a movie competition against other begging film developers and I won first place at the Tiger Film Fest in Summit County. I was invited to submit my video to the Breckenridge Film Festival and this video can be seen every night at 11pm on Summit TV.