2nd FLOOR DEMOS
MUSIC TECHNOLOGY
Tablatron: A Box With an Ear for Tabla
Location – GVU Cafe
Demo Description: Tabla is one of the most sophisticated percussion instruments in the world. We present a computer system that can listen to a tabla performance, analyze the sounds and rhythms produced, and respond as a virtual musician. The project demonstrates the application of a realtime machine learning system.
Faculty: Parag Chordia, ppc@gatech.edu
Student: Alex Rae
Musical Composition Networks
Location – GVU Cafe
Demo Description: The audio software used by everyone from recording studio gurus to garageband hobbyists still relies on a user interface that grew out of analog cassette decks. This project offers a novel, three-dimensional environment for real-time mixing and manipulation of sound objects, exploring how new interfaces can expand the ways in which we create, remix, compose, and perform music.
Faculty: Jason Freeman, jason.freeman@music.gatech.edu
Students: Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash , Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, Sriram Viswanathan
Bluetaps
Location – GVU Cafe
Demo Description: The Bluetaps project explores how new generation smart-phones can be utilized as powerful and expressive musical controllers.
Faculty: Gil Weinberg, gilw.gatech.edu
Students: Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash , Thomas Smyth, Sriram Viswanathan
ARFaçade
Location: Room 209
Demo Description: ARFaçade is the augmented reality version of the acclaimed
desktop-based interactive drama, Façade. Few entertainment experiences combine
interactive virtual characters, non-linear narrative, and unconstrained embodied
interaction. AR Façade moves the player from sitting in front of the computer
display, where they interact with small virtual characters via a keyboard and mouse,
into a shared physical room, where they interact with life-sized virtual characters
via speech, gesture and physical movement.
Web: www.gvu.gatech.edu/arfacade/
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre, blair@cc.gatech.edu, Michael Mateas
Student(s): Steven Dow, Manish Mehta, Ellie Harmon
Virtual Rear Projection
Location: Room 233
Demo Description: Large interactive displays for games and work. Creating interactive surfaces with rear projected properties using multiple front projectors, allowing flexible deployment of interactive wall-sized displays. This research has led to the release of the GVU PROCAMS toolkit, designed to ease the construction of projector camera systems. Come see our 17-foot SmartBoard in the Wall Lab, TSRB 2nd Floor, Room 233.
Faculty: Jim Rehg, rehg@cc.gatech.edu, Gregory Abowd, abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Jay Summet, Matt Flagg
SONIFICATION LAB
Auditory Graph Design, Context Cues, and Individual Differences
Location: Room 222
Demo Description: Creating a (visual) graph without axes, tick marks, or labels will generally earn you an 'F' in high school math class. After all, it is just a squiggle on a page without the added context that those things provide. Auditory graphs require the same elements, so we are studying how best to create them, introduce them into an auditory graph, and examine how people learn to use them for better (auditory) graph comprehension. At the same time, every person hears things slightly differently. Our work in individual differences in auditory display comprehension examines such questions as:
i) How can we determine, in advance, what differences will have an effect (if any) in the perception and comprehension of auditory graphs and sonification?
ii) What are the characteristics of the listener that predict performance? We are studying a range of factors, including perception, cognition, and listening experience. One major factor we are considering is whether a listener is sighted or blind, and if blind, at what age blindness occurred.
Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu
Student(s): Michael Nees, Lisa Mauney
The SWAN Project
Location – Room 222
Demo Description: The SWAN Project is an NSF funded collaboration between Professors Bruce Walker (Psychology and Computing) and Frank Dellaert (Computing) to develop a system to help people with low vision navigate from place to place, while being aware of features of the surrounding environment, such as stairs, signs, offices, shops, curbs, and so on.
Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/swan/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu; Frank Dellaert, dellaert@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Jeff Lindsay, Jeff Wilson, Joseph Patrao, Craig Cambias
The Accessible Aquarium Project
Location: Room 222
Demo Description: Museums, science centers, zoos and aquaria are faced with educating and entertaining an increasingly diverse visitor population with varying physical and sensory needs. There are very few guidelines to help these facilities develop non-visual exhibit information, especially for dynamic exhibits. In an effort to make such informal learning environments (ILEs) more accessible to visually impaired visitors, the Georgia Tech Accessible Aquarium Project is studying auditory display and sonification methods for use in exhibit interpretation.
Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu
Student(s): Anandi Pendse, Chong Kim
Bone Conduction Audio Research
Location: Room 222
Demo Description: We are investigating the use of bone-conduction headsets in auditory displays. This merits many different investigations into the perceptual qualities of listening through bone-conduction. This includes thresholds, spatial audio abilities, and speech intelligibility.
Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/bonephones/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, (404) 894-8265, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu
Student(s): Raymond Stanley
EMERGENT GAME GROUP (EGG)
Mermaids Phase 1 Prototype
Location – Room 223
Demo Description: A Massively Multiplayer Online Game that uses emergent social behavior as a design material.
Faculty: Celia Pearce, celia.pearce@lcc.gatech.eu
Students: Calvin Ashmore, Will Riley, Rob Fitzpatrick, Anand Michael Arteaga, Chris Langson, Walter Kim,
ActionQuest
Location - Room 223
Demo Description: An activist "Big Game" created for the U.S. Social Forum.
Faculty: Celia Pearce, celia.pearce@lcc.gatech.eu
Students: Will Riley, Jeremy Rogers, Michael Hansen, Evan Barba, Susan Robinson, Carl DiSalvo
EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION
Georgia Tech’s eTV Protoyping Group explores the future of narrative forms in the new digital medium that is emerging as TV converges with computational formats. The eTV Prototyping Group works by prototyping applications on current and hypothetical platforms, using narrative material drawn from actual and planned television shows and by creating its own narratives specifically designed for interactivity.
Faculty: Janet Murray (janet.murray@lcc.gatech.edu)
Website: etv.gatech.edu
Ben 10 - Sync Game
Location – Room 223
Demo Description: In conjunction with the AFI Digital Content Lab Sync Game is a Cartoon Network multimedia experience in a gaming environment. The experience, which is being developed parallel to an industry product as part of the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab, provides episodes of Ben 10, a Cartoon Network series, integrated with contextual games relevant to the content.
Faculty: Janet Murray, janet.murray@lcc.gatech.edu
Student: Sergio Goldenberg, sergio.goldenberg@gatech.edu
Virtual TV Couch
Location – Room 223
Demo Description: Currently, the television industry has not been able to offer an adequate product to facilitate the interaction of viewers that are watching the same programming, but are not in the same physical space. This prototype offers novel interactive television (ITV) applications utilizing a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) platform to enable enhanced communications, impulsive interactions, sharing experiences, and active discussions of small viewing groups, such us family, friends, and classmates.
Faculty: Janet Murray, janet.murray@lcc.gatech.edu
Student: Sergio Goldenberg, sergio.goldenberg@gatech.edu
DVFX Screenings Revisited
Location: Room 226
Demo Description: Each spring, the Digital Video Special Effects class (CS 4480) present and discuss the short video segments (less than 1 minute each) that they have produced to showcase the technical special effects they have generated during the course of the semester. The class combines understanding of the technical issues underlying the generation of special effects with the expression of artistic creativity by producing a short video. Students are required to do all aspects of the production from story-boarding to shot-planning to camera-work to writing code for special effects generation, to sound and music editing and video editing. This demo is a screening of DFVX videos from the past seven years.
Faculty: Irfan Essa, (404) 894-6856, irfan@cc.gatech.edu
COGNITIVE COMPUTING LAB
The Cognitive Computing Lab (CCL: www.ccl.cc.gatech.edu) pursues fundamental and applied research in the context of real-world problems that are "cognitive" in two respects: 1 (AI) they require cognition: we use artificial intelligence and learning technologies to produce intelligent behaviors; and 2 (HCC) they aid cognition: we use cognitive principles to design systems that interact naturally with humans. Our research thrusts include intelligent agents for interactive digital entertainment and computer games, and information analytics for decision support. Current projects include:
Interactive Authoring
Location – Room 218
Demo Description: A significant bottleneck in developing interactive games and other forms of digital entertainment is the effort required to script realistic behaviors for all possible situations that might be encountered by the characters in the game. We are developing techniques using which the author can simply demonstrate a behavior to the system, which then analyzes it and writes its own code to provide that behavior in the game. We will show examples of creating strategies by demonstration for the RTS game Wargus.
Faculty: Ashwin Ram, ashwin@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Manish Mehta, Saurav Sahay, Kinshuk, Santi Ontonon
Adaptive Games
Location – Room 218
Demo Description: In order to go beyond scripted behaviors, characters and other agents embedded in an interactive game must be able to modify themselves and improve over time, developing new strategies and behaviors to cope with new situations and different types of play which may not have been anticipated at design time. We are developing techniques using which embedded agents can recognize opportunities to change their behaviors and adapt themselves automatically during play. We will demonstrate examples of before/after behavior of adaptive NPCs embedded in the RTS game Wargus.
Faculty: Ashwin Ram, ashwin@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Manish Mehta, Saurav Sahay, Kinshuk, Santi Ontonon
Intelligent Drama Management
Location – Room 218
Demo Description: Each player is different, and even the same player may play differently at different times. In order to improve the player experience, we are developing techniques using which the game "director" can learn about the player by observing the ongoing player interaction and change the game on the fly to make it more interesting. We will demonstrate an example of our techniques using the interactive fiction Anchorhead.
Faculty: Ashwin Ram, ashwin@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Manish Mehta, Saurav Sahay, Kinshuk, Santi Ontonon
Medical Information Analytics
Location – Room 218
Demo Description: Knowledge-based expert systems start to become obsolete as soon as they are implemented since they are not updated with new knowledge. Such knowledge is present in published documents (e.g., scientific articles) but may be implicit. We will demonstrate a knowledge extraction system that can highlight knowledge-bearing text in published medical literature. Our technology can identify relevant sections of medical abstracts, identify the ontological terms and acronyms, and identify and display relationships using a graphical user interface.
Faculty: Ashwin Ram, ashwin@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Manish Mehta, Saurav Sahay, Kinshuk, Santi Ontonon
DESIGN INTELLIGENCE
STAB: Story Abduction for Proactive Intelligence
Location: Room 225
The high-level task of investigative analysis is to generate an explanation that connects events in the input stream of data. STAB is a knowledge-based system designed to aid in investigative analysis. The STAB system represents crime patterns as hierarchical scripts with goals and states. It generates multiple explanatory hypotheses for a data stream containing interleaved sequences of events, recognizes intent in a specific event sequence, and calculates confidence values for the generated hypotheses based on factors such as explanatory coverage. We view STAB as automated cognitive assistants to human analysts: it may support investigative analysis by generating and managing multiple competing hypotheses.
Faculty: Ashok Goel, ashok@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Neha Sugandh, Summer Adams
ACT: Learning about Aquaria in Middle Schools
Location: Room 225
Demo Description: Complex systems are an important part of our world. Development of accurate mental models of complex systems is an integral part of learning in science. While experts in science demonstrate a rich understanding of a complex system in terms of its interrelated structure, behaviors and functions, novices express their understanding of a complex system primarily in terms of its structure and demonstrate minimal understanding of its behaviors and functions. The goal of our project is to facilitate the learning of the interconnectedness of the structure, behaviors and functions of complex systems. ACT (Aquarium Construction Toolkit) is an interactive learning environment targeting middle-school students. ACT facilitates learning about complex systems (such as an aquarium) by allowing the students to build conceptual models of complex systems in Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) ontology. SBF ontology emphasizes all three aspects of a complex system and, more importantly, their interrelationships. Furthermore, ACT allows learners to simulate their conceptual models in the NetLogo simulation environment as a means of evaluating their models. ACT also contains an electronic notebook to record data and other information generated during learners’ inquiry.
Faculty: Ashok Goel, ashok@cc.gatech.edu; Spencer Rugaber
Student: Brian Sherwell, Swaroop Vattam
CONTEXTUAL COMPUTING GROUP
Deaf 911
Location – Room 243
Demo Description: The Deaf 911 system emulates an TTY (teletypewriter) on a cell phone providing deaf users with direct and easy access to emergency services. Deaf users can dial 911 from a cell phone and communicate with the 911 operator through an Instant Messaging style interface. The software TTY then encodes the text as TTY signals and sends it over the voice channel. Incoming TTY signals are decoded and displayed as text.
Faculty: Thad Starner, thad@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Zahoor Zafrulla
Gesture Watch
Location – Room 243
Demo Description: The Gesture Watch is a wireless, contact-free, gesture-based wrist interface. Infrared proximity sensors detect the user's hand movement above the watch, which allows users to command appliances in the environment through hand gestures that the system recognizes.
Faculty: Thad Starner,thad@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Jung Soo Kim, Jiasheng He
Mobile Dance Revolution
Location – Room 243
Demo Description: Mobile Dance Revolution is a phone version of the popular Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) game from Konami. The addition of two foot-mounted wireless accelerometers allows the player to kick in the direction of an arrow instead of simply pressing a button on the phone. The game was developed on Motorola E680g phones in conjunction with Motorola Labs.
Faculty: Thad Starner,thad@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Nirmal Patel
Copy Cat: American Sign Language Recognition and Education
Location - 243
Demo Description: This project involves the design and evaluation of an interactive computer game that allows deaf children to practice their American Sign Language skills. The game includes an automatic sign language recognition component utilizing computer vision and wireless accelerometers. The project is a collaboration with Dr. Harley Hamilton at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf.
Faculty: Thad Starner,thad@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Helene Brashear, Valerie Summit, Seungyon Lee
Child's Play: Measuring Developmental Progress with Augmented Toys
Location – Room 243
Demo Description: The Child's Play project focuses on the design of technological tools to help increase the understanding of children's development through the exploration of toddler-object interaction. Specifically, this project embeds wireless sensors into children's toys to allow automatic recognition of different types of play. Online recognition via a mobile platform allows for transparent capture of rich media surrounding important interactions for retrospective analysis.
Faculty: Thad Starner, thad@cc.gatech.edu; Gregory Abowd,abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Students: Tracy Westeyn, Julie Kientz
Activity Discovery
Location – Room 243
Demo Description: The activity discovery project seeks to develop unsupervised analysis methods that detect recurring patterns in sensor data. Such algorithms are useful for analyzing large data sets to focus attention on unknown patterns. For example, the algorithm might identify common gestures in our everyday lives without a priori knowledge or detect repetitive actions in animal behaviors.
Faculty: Thad Starner, thad@cc.gatech.edu
Students: David Minnen, Stephen Cuzzort, Erik Hollembeak
DIRECT BRAIN INTERFACES – GT BRAINLAB
Location - Room 243
The mission of the GT BrainLab is to pioneer dramatically new paradigms for human-computer interaction by exploring the potential of biometric and direct brain inputs for communication and control. BrainLab technologies aim to improve the quality of life for people with severe motor disabilities, and to explore possibilities for mainstream applications for biometric technologies. Demos and posters will include:
The Aware Chair
Demo Description: In order to incorporate an intelligent, context-aware communication, environmental control, and navigation system that learns its users’ preferences and habits in order to predict selections. The goal of the Aware Chair research is to make brain signal control faster, easier, and more accurate for people with severe physical disabilities. A new heads-up display based on visual brain signals is the basis of our latest study.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
Neural Internet
Demo Description: Access to the internet can be life-changing for people with severe disabilities. The BrainBrowser allows neural control of web surfing, including following hyperlinks and web controls.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
Brain Gesture Recognition
Demo Description: This new study is exploring composite patterns of brain signals in order to determine if gesture languages such as American Sign Language can be recognized with EEG.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
BrainArt: Creative Expression
Demo Description: Visual art, such as drawing and painting, requires continuous control accuracy that is difficult to achieve with direct brain interfaces. This new study incorporates functional Near Infrared (fNIR) imaging, a direct brain approach based on measuring the hemodynamic response of the brain to activity.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
Neural Plasticity
Demo Description: A new collaboration with GT Applied Physiology and BioEngineering is exploring the possibilities of incorporating direct brain interfaces with rehabilitation robots to provide treatment options for people with severe paralysis resulting from strokes.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
Virtual Rear Projection
Location: Room 233
Demo Description: Large interactive displays for games and work. Creating interactive surfaces with rear projected properties using multiple front projectors, allowing flexible deployment of interactive wall-sized displays. This research has led to the release of the GVU PROCAMS toolkit, designed to ease the construction of projector camera systems.
Faculty: Jim Rehg,
rehg@cc.gatech.edu, Gregory Abowd,
abowd@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Jay Summet, Matt Flagg
Demo Index
