UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING GROUP
Location: Room 330
Energy Consumption Display
Demo Description: We investigated the impact of an in-home Energy Consumption Display (ECD), both stationary and portable versions, on household energy awareness and consumption. ECDs were deployed eight homes for three weeks each, providing half of the participants with a portable version and the others with a stationary one. Users reduced energy consumption by an average of 11% by identifying high-power devices in their home and by playfully setting conservation goals. Users who reported having low or moderate awareness of energy consumption at the outset of the study benefited most from the display. We found that the portable ECD better supported house-wide experimentation, but settled into stationary use after the initial survey of the home. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the design of in-home ECDs.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd
Student: Tae Jung
2.BufferCam. Yi Han
Demo Description: Selective Archiving is the ability of an always-recording video camera that allows users to selectively save a past recording on demand in a certain amount of time after the fact. BufferCam is a prototype of a standalone video/audio recorder that can be always recording for selective archiving and is easy to deploy for people with little computer skills.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd
Student: Yi Han
Validation of Parent-Collected Observational Data in the Natural Environment for Use in Behavioral Interventions.
Demo Description: We propose to study the feasibility of applying a human annotated video observation system to the problem of assessment and treatment of problem behavior exhibited by children with autism and related disabilities. Previous attempts to collect information on environment-behavior relationships for this population in the natural environment have been unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. It is our belief that human annotated video may resolve many of these factors that have been impediments in the past. Parents will be recruited for this study and asked to identify locations in the home where problem behavior most frequently occurs. Those locations will be equipped with a video camera that will record for a 12 hour period. In addition, parents will be provided with a device that allows them to indicate when a problem behavior has occurred and simultaneously annotate the video data. The goal of the study is to determine the validity of the parent collected data. This will be accomplished by comparing the instances of problem behavior they annotate to those scored by the trained observers.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd
Student: Nazneen Anwer
Human Power Harvesting
Demo Description: Harvesting power from human is an attractive idea in human-powered wearable computing. Our question is how much power can be practically harvested from daily human activity. We have collected a large continuous acceleration dataset from human subjects and developed a numerical model of inertial power harvester. Based on collected acceleration dataset and power harvester model, we can estimate available electrical power from mobile devices, depending upon form factor and body locations where the harvester could be mounted.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd
Student: Jaeseok Yun
Family Telepresence
Demo Description: Non-residential parents and children in divorced families struggle to stay in touch. We are investigating the needs of these families to inform the design of technological intervention in this domain. The ShareTable is one such system. It combines videoconferencing and a shared tabletop surface to help children and adults who live apart stay in touch through natural activities like playing games, reading together, and doing homework.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd
Student: Lana Yarosh
Broad Band Power Line Positioning
Demo Description: Power line positioning is a localization technique that uses signals transmitted over the power line and received by portable tags to localize users in an indoor environment. Broadband power line positioning increases the accuracy, robustness, and stability of the original power line work.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd
Student: Erich Stuntebeck
Viz-A-Vis
Demo Description: Viz-A-Vis is a visualization tool for understanding human activity in natural environments over long periods of time. It is a sensing, interpreting and visualizing tool for analysis. Overhead cameras sense the human activity in natural environments. The data from the overhead cameras is interpreted by computing motion and blob-tracking. All levels on interpretation are visualized in a geographical information system where the floor plan of the inhabited space serves as the geography and time is stacked as layers on top of the plane. The goal of the tool is to contextualize video analysis in the space and time where target behaviors occur in order to facilitate rapid overview, filtering and zooming, and details on demand of large volumes of video data with potentially sparse target behaviors.
Faculty: Gregory Abowd
Student: Mario Romero
AUGMENTED ENVIRONMENT LAB
Location: Room 333
AR/Presence
Demo Description: Presence is a concept currently used in the VR community to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of virtual environments. Presence is defined as the “sense of being there” or, more appropriate for our purposes, “a perceptual illusion of non-mediation”. In this project, we are investigating presence for use in AR evaluation. In this first phase we are exploring what this concept means in a mixed reality setting, how existing ....measurement techniques such as questionnaires and physiological sensing can be applied to AR applications, and whether existing data regarding immersion factors and presence translate to the AR domain. Our first experiment recreates the virtual “pit” experiment done at UNC in AR with the goal of producing similar physiological effects on the study participants. The overall goal of this work is to generate evaluation techniques for AR as well as to begin defining design and usability guidelines for the creation of effective AR experiences.
Faculty: Maribeth Gandy,maribeth.gandy@imtc.gatech.edu; Blair
MacIntyre, blair@cc.gatech.edu ; Richard Catrambone, rc7@prism.gatech.edu; Jay Bolter, jay.bolter@lcc.gatech.edu
Student: Chris Alvarez
AR Scratch
This project explores how augmented-reality technology can be presented to young programmers. MIT's Scratch environment allows children to create 2D animations and games through simple drag and drop programming. AR Scratch extends this authoring environment, permitting digital creations to be mixed with real-life objects. Through interaction with physical objects, children can influence the behavior of actors in their programs which now inhabit 3D real-world spaces. The general intent of the work is to explore how interaction metaphors can be used to match authors' cognitive abilities to the capabilities of this technology.
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre
Student: Iulian Radu
Handheld Augmented Reality Games
Demo Description: In this project, we are exploring how to create augmented reality games using handheld devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs or handheld game consoles. We are particularly interested in multi-player games that combine the power of computer games (i.e., continuous simulation and gameplay) with the social aspects of board and card games (i.e., easy flow between social activities and game play, understanding what other players are doing by watching their actions). We will demonstrate a number of prototype games across a variety of devices.
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre, Jay Bolter, Maribeth Gandy
Students: Sami Deen (MS CS), Yan Xu (HCC PhD), Ta Huynh Duy Nguyen (HCC PhD), Karthik Ravaeendran (MS CS), Kimberly Spreen (MS CS), Timmy White (MS CS), Michael Gorbsky (CM undergrad), Brian Davidson (MS CS).
Non-Photorealistic Rendering for Augmented Reality Applications
Demo Description: Photorealistic and non-photorealistic rendering are two ways to merge virtual and real images in augmented reality. Particularly, non- photorealistic rendering (NPR) mimics artist’s work and produces many interesting and appealing results. Our demos show several NPR effects (e.g., silhouette and watercolor-like) for real-time AR applications.
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre, Greg Turk
Student: Jiajian Chen
ThoughtPlay
Virtual environments provide opportunities for studying how cognition is affected by the interaction with external representations of knowledge. Through this project, we have built a prototype 3D mind-mapping environment where users link abstract concepts to virtual objects. Structural knowledge can be depicted through interactions such as spatial organizations of concepts, hierarchical groupings, and tangibly responsive relationships. The intent of this work is to evolve a platform for representing abstract thoughts as tangible entities.
Faculty: Blair MacIntyre
Student: Iulian Radu
EVERYDAY COMPUTING LAB
Location: Room 334
How Social Data Impacts Decision Making
Demo Description: Social data--what other people are doing and have done--is a frequent information source that people use when making decisions. Computers can collect and aggregate social data across both space and time, making social data a powerful source of information in the digital world. However, there is little understanding of how digital social data impacts decision making. We are doing research to answer the following questions about social data: (1) how do people use social data when making decisions? and (2) in what domains is social data useful? We have built prototypes that explore how social data can be used to support decision making in privacy management, security management, and nonprofit fundraising.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt
Student: Jeremy Goecks
Dr. J Says...
Demo Description: Dr. J Says... is a web based application that makes real-life meal recommendations to its users from the restaurant of their choice based on their health and taste profiles. It represents a class of tools that use information and communication technologies to translate complex medical guidelines into contextually relevant medical advice. The Dr. J Says... research project is studying the impact of such personalized, pervasive and real-life advice on patient compliance in the area of diet related chronic diseases.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt
Student: Jiten Chhabra MD
MAHI: Facilitating Reflection in Individual Diabetes Management
In many situations in life, people learn by reflecting on results of their past choices and actions. In case of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, reflection helps individuals make more informed decisions and tune their lifestyle choices to keep diabetes under control. MAHI (Mobile Access to Health Information) is designed as a technology probe to both help us study reflection as it happens in course of individuals' daily lives and to facilitate it by enabling capture and access to past activities and their health impact. MAHI is a distributed mobile application that utilizes a mobile phone's media features to allow easy capture of activity records through verbal descriptions and pictures. At the same time, a glucose meter connected with the phone via Bluetooth helps individuals capture impact of recorded activities on their blood sugar. Individuals can reflect on their records and discuss them with peers and healthcare providers while viewing them on a password-protected website.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt
Student: Lena Mamykina
Enabling individuals to monitor and learn from personal health data
One of the most important factors in maintaining a chronic condition is tracking and managing everyday information. For diabetics, this may mean keeping a record of blood glucose level and carbohydrate intake. For those in physical therapy, keeping track of therapist-mandated exercises
as well as the incidence of any exacerbating activities may be more appropriate. We are exploring how computer-based health monitoring and analysis systems can motivate and empower individuals to take control of their condition and meet personal health and wellness goals.
We are in the initial design phases of a system which will allow individuals to explore and analyze their own health and wellness data. Users of our system will be able to track and monitor self-selected health and wellness metrics, and investigate this data through a range of analytic tools. Our intent is to design a prototype that can provide immediate utility to a wide range of individuals, as well as allow users to progressively customize it as both their condition and their personal goals evolve.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt
Student(s): Eugene Medynskiy, Andrew Miller
Understanding Pre-diabetes Interventions
Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death listed on U.S. death certificates in 2006, and affects about 7.6% (23.6 million) of the population. This number is projected to rise to 14.5% (37.7 million) by the year 2031. Type 2 diabetes accounts for 90-95% of the total number of cases, and this disease is almost always preceded by the condition of pre-diabetes. Research has shown that modest lifestyle change during pre-diabetes can delay or prevent the development of Type 2 diabetes by as much as 58%. However, it has proven challenging for people to enact this change without intensive counseling. We focus on determining what mechanisms are involved in initiating and maintaining lifestyle change in people with pre-diabetes with the goal of creating a digital substitute for intensive lifestyle counseling aimed at those who have limited time and/or resources.
Faculty: Elizabeth Mynatt
Student(s): Yee Chieh (Denise) Chew, Hee Young Jeong
PIXI LAB
Location: Room 334
WindowScape: A Task Oriented Window Manager
Demo Description: WindowScape is a software tool to help people perform multiple activities concurrently. Although knowledge workers frequently spend a great deal of time switching between tasks, modern commercial user interfaces provide little to aid this multitasking process. The result is often cluttered desktops, hard-to-find windows, and difficulty keeping track of one’s work. We seek to overcome this with WindowScape, which provides a simple, lightweight way to view windows by the task they pertain to. But to relieve the user from having to make advance decisions about where their windows belong, we employ a novel temporal metaphor, which allows windows to be assigned to tasks implicitly, and only once the user is ready to make such decisions.
Faculty: Keith Edwards, keith@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Craig Tashman craig@cc.gatech.edu
Reflecting on the Invisible: Understanding End-User Perceptions of Ubiquitous Computing
Demo Description: How can designers of ubiquitous computing technologies ensure that they understand the non-functional needs, values, and expectations of end-users? In this project, we use a qualitative method from public policy to elicit reflective feedback from end-users about technologies that they may not yet have used nor fully comprehend. Our study uncovers information about end-user perceptions of RFID, including a range of “folk theories” held by the public about this technology, and their associations of it with certain social groups and values. We examine how these perceptions can limit technological adoption, and discuss challenges for the design and deployment of ubiquitous computing systems.
Faculty: Keith Edwards
Students: Erika Poole, Chris Le Dantec
Supporting Home Network Setup and Maintenance Activities
Demo Description: Recently, a number of researchers in HCI and CSCW have begun to examine user experience difficulties of networked computing in the home.
Currently, we know little about the nature of these difficulties, nor how householders cope with overcoming them. We are conducting empirical studies that examine why people have trouble setting up and maintaining networked equipment at home, as well as how they collaborate with outside parties to overcome these problems
Faculty: Keith Edwards
Student: Erika Poole
Ambient Routing: Speculative Designs for Improving Usability of Home Networks
Demo Descriptions: Home networking equipment is often unsightly. Hence householders frequently hide these devices in closets, behind books, or under sofas.
We have created a set of speculative designs for home network routers that encourage people to ‘get their routers out from under the couch and into visible spaces of the home. In addition to just making the hardware more aesthetically pleasing, these designs also incorporate ambient information displays intended to provide householders with a general sense of the health of their network, as well as basic help in diagnosing and troubleshooting network problems.
Faculty: Keith Edwards
Student: Tom Morgan
Resource Management and Building “Community Mindshare” for Anti-trafficking Organizations
Demo Description: We have limited understanding of technology use in nonprofit organizations, particularly technology to support effective coordination among organizations that serve high-risk vulnerable populations such as AIDS victims, truant youths, victims of domestic violence, the elderly, and human-trafficking victims. However, we believe there is a strong and effective role researchers or technologists in general can play to support nonprofits in these subsectors. To better understand this role, we conducted a qualitative study of 17 nonprofit organizations working with human trafficking victims. In a recent study, we identified and characterized an emerging phenomenon of networked nonprofits. This finding points us in the direction of what type of organizational form needs to be supported using a technology infrastructure. The data from the study also suggests the type of information sharing that needs to occur in order to enable better coordination among nonprofit organizations. Such collaboration is critical for providing timely services to members of high-risk populations. In order to facilitate collaboration, we are currently designing an information system to act as an intervention to better enable organizations to share and manage resources effectively as well as advancing their coalition-building efforts.
Faculty: Keith Edwards
Student: Jennifer Stoll
ICEBox++: A Interactive Home Network Management System
Demo Description: Since networks have expanded from workplaces and labs into the home, managing them is no longer just a job for skilled network administrators, but also general home users who have little technical knowledge of networking. Home users must deal with network management tasks such as network/device configuration, security management, and troubleshooting. Such tasks are not easy for them due to the inherent characteristics of the home network (e.g. complexity and invisibility) and the lack of existing tools designed for home users. In this research, we aim to develop an interactive home network management system that will assist such users to manage their home networks. To achieve this goal, we developed ICEbox++, a web-based interactive home network management system with a new interaction model based on direct manipulation. The continuous visual components of the home network allows users, even those with very little technical knoweldge of networking, to understand and manage their networks more effectively and efficiently.
Faculty: Keith Edwards, keith@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Jeonghwa Yang, David Haslem
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES & INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Location – Room 334
ICT’s for Democracy, Peace and Reconciliation
Demo Description: Inventing new information and communication systems and examining the role of existing systems in post-conflict peace and reconciliation. Exploring the ways that ICTs can facilitate democratic processes and ideals. Can rich media and the internet help to create dialogue and ultimately heal a nation? How does ICT policy, institutions and infrastructure rebuild and respond in post-conflict nations? How do ICT’s affect the democratic and political sphere?
Faculty: Mike Best
WORK2PLAY LAB
Location: Work2Play Lab, Room 335A
Domestic Technologies
Demo Description: Ever wonder who's surfing on your wireless internet connection at home? Or how much energy turning off the lights actually saves? We are investigating how householders understand and manage different home infrastructures. We look in particular at what "invisible" aspects of system use affect intelligibility. Our two case studies are: home networks and resource delivery systems (for gas/water/electricity). Our goal is to determine how to improve intelligibility by making certain information more visible (through a series of empirical studies and technology probe deployments).
Faculty: Beki Grinter, beki@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Marshini Chetty marshini@cc.gatech.edu, www.cc.gatech.edu/~marshini
Culturally-Relevant Technologies for Encouraging Healthy Eating Practices
Demo Description: Our research focuses on designing systems that encourage healthy eating in specific cultural contexts. In particular, we are examining how eating practices are socially and culturally influenced within low-income African American communities. We are motivated by the fact that this segment of the population experiences a disproportionate amount of diet-related related health problems. We will demo EatWell, a cell phone application that allows individuals to record and share audio memories of how they have tried to eat healthfully with others in their neighborhoods. In addition, we will overview a mobile game that we are currently developing. This game, OrderUP!, helps people learn strategies for eating healthfully in a lightweight and fun way.
Faculty: Beki Grinter, beki@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Andrea Grimes, agrimes@cc.gatech.edu
CONTEXTUALIZED SUPPORT FOR LEARNING
Location: Room 340
Georgia Computes!
Demo Description: Georgia Computes! is an NSF "Broadening Participation in Computing" alliance focused on increasing the number and diversity of computing students in the state of Georgia. The goal of this effort is to improve the computing education pipeline across the state of Georgia. Some of our outreach efforts include attracting girls into computing with activities in camps and after school programs with our partners, the Girl Scout Council of Northwest Georgia and the YWCA of Georgia, offering summer camps to middle and high school students, teaching high school educators how to teach computing using motivating examples, and offering workshops to University System of Georgia computing faculty on new approaches to motivate computing education.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Jill Dimond
Computer Science Education for End-User Programmers
Demo Description: Recent estimates for the number of end-user programmers indicate this population is over four times larger than the community of professional programmers. Native scripting capabilities have now become integrated with media manipulation tools like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Blender. Such new support for end-user programming creates many opportunities for researchers. This research is an effort to enable us to gain a deeper understanding of how and why media professionals, like graphic designers, learn to script. Specifically, we are interested in what they know about Computer Science, how they learned it, and how we might support newcomers in learning Computer Science content informally.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial, guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Brian Dorn
Designing Online Communities
Demo Description: GaComputes is an NSF Broadening Participation in Computing focused on increasing the number and diversity of computing students in the state of Georgia. We are studying youths' perceptions of computing: what is computing? what are careers in computing? how does computing relate to the tools, gadgets, and online websites that youth use for fun in their daily lives? Our goal is to better understand what kids do for fun with technology and develop interventions to encourage them to consider degrees and careers in computing.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial
Student: Sarita Yardi
Game Testers to Technologist
Demo Description: African American males play video games more often than any other group. Yet African Americans have dismal representation in the games industry and their interest in video games is not leading them in to computer science fields. We believe there are many social and cultural factors that influence the transfer of interest and skills developed through video games to academic and employment success. To address these factors we are developing a game tester job-training program. Game testing is sometimes considered an entry point for careers in the games industry. But more than just careers in gaming, by developing game testing skills participants will look under-the- hood of the games, seeing the structure of digital media, learning vocabulary, and understanding basic job skills and the value of their opinion in the field of computer science.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial
Student: Betsy James DiSalvo
Designing and Building a Chat Client for the One Laptop Per Child at Summer Camp
Demo Description: Most pre-teens and teens are ill-informed about what the field of computing constitutes. We spent two weeks at a Girl Scout camp in Northwest Georgia where we taught girl scouts to design and program a chat client (like AOL instant messenger or MSN Messenger) for the One Laptop Per Child XO. We developed a programming environment to allow if statements and simple property changing statements such as color, sounds, and images. Underpinning with design, programming, and humanitarian themes, we aimed to fill in the gaps of the possibilities that computing can hold as a potential career for our learners.
Faculty: Mark Guzdial
Student: Jill Dimond
Crafting Kids Into Computing (PicoCrickets)
Demo Description: We use PicoCrickets to introduce computing in a way that challenges kid's stereotype of computing. Kids create a musical pickle, time their reactions to sound and light, create a kinetic sculpture, and more by doing drag-and-drop programming. We are getting statistically significant positive changes in the student's attitudes towards computing with these activities in just four hour workshops.
Faculty: Mark Guzdia and Barb Ericson
Driving Kids Into Computing (LEGO NXT Robots)
Demo Description: We use LEGO robots to introduce computing in a hands-on and concrete way. We have students learn about problem solving and simple sequential programming by having them program the robots to go through a course outlined on the floor. We have them learn about repetition and creating reusable methods by having them program a 30 second dance. We teach about conditionals by having the students program the robots to follow a black line on a white background.
Faculty: Mark Guzdia and Barb Ericson
Animating Kids Into Computing (Scratch)
Demo Description: We use Scratch to introduce computing concepts by having kids use drag-and-drop programming to create 2D animations and games. Scratch integrates sounds and images. Kids can share their Scratch creations on the Scratch website. Scratch also allows kids to create their own images.
Faculty: Mark Guzdia and Barb Ericson
Directing Kids Into Computing (Alice)
Demo Description: We use Alice to introduce computing concepts by having kids use drag-and-drop programming to create 3D movies and games. Kids like directing their own movies. Alice has a large selection of 3D models that the kids can control.
Faculty: Mark Guzdia and Barb Ericson
INFORMATION INTERFACES LAB
Location: Room 342A
Jigsaw: Visualization for Investigative & Intelligence Analysis
Demo Description: We are developing a system called Jigsaw that helps people discover hidden plots, stories, and connections embedded across large collections of text documents. In essence, Jigsaw helps people "put the pieces together" through human-centered, interactive exploration of the documents and the entities within them. It is a visual analytics system that can be used in domains such as law enforcement, investigative reporting, business intelligence, and academic research. Jigsaw provides a collection of visualizations that each portray different aspects of the documents, including connections between different entities.
Faculty: John Stasko, stasko@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Zhicheng Liu, Vasili Panatazopoulos, Gennadiy Stepanov,
Sarah Williams, Carsten Goerg, goerg@cc.gatech.edu
Imprint: Community visualization of printer data
Demo Description: In 2004, U.S. companies used 3.2 billion reams of paper (that is 3 million sheets every minute). And office paper consumption is going up, not down. In fact, it's expected to grow by 50% by 2010. However, printed documents are important to businesses and workgroups. We also notice that workers socialize, collaborate informally, and stay aware of happenings in the printer area. Imprint is a visualization kiosk that runs in the printer area and depicts popular concepts, social connections, and sustainability data from the print stream.
Faculty: John Stasko
Students: Zachary Pousman, Hafez Rouzati
LEARNING BY DESIGN LAB
Location: LBD Lab – Room 346 – Student Area
Jacket's Garage: Simulation Software that Provides Scaffolding for Exploration and Explanation in the context of Design-Based Science Learning
Demo Description: We aim to help middle school students understand complex concepts in science and to use what they learn to generate scientific explanations. Our software, Jacket's Garage, is designed to be used in conjunction with a design-based science curriculum, where the learning process takes place in the context of designing artifacts. Jacket's Garage is the third generation of software we've designed for this purpose. It is integrated into a Hovercraft curriculum used in an after-school informal educational program. Students are introduced to basic concepts in physics that govern the motion of a hovercraft, such as lift, air flow, friction, and power. For each design challenge, they first explore the physical materials and their influences on the hovercraft’s performance, and generate questions that guide them through the process of making the hovercraft work in the desired manner. The software then allows them to explore possibilities and run experiments to answer their questions. It also scaffolds the process of generating scientific explanations based on the concepts encountered in the experiments. Learners can refer to a Case Library within the software that consists of cases describing real-world problems and how they have been solved (successfully or unsuccessfully). They navigate to this library, in the context of a design problem, and look up cases and stories to get ideas about solutions to their problems. In the process, they also learn the science involved in the cases. They take what they've learned back to the real world as they design their hovercrafts. The software allows for the exploration of more possibilities than would be possible if experimenting with a physical device. It allows them to do careful comparisons in experiments and to race their virtual hovercrafts. The demonstration will focus on highlighting the affordances that the software provides for the students to (a) explore the physical realm of hovercraft science and (b) construct scientific explanations using explanation templates.
Faculty: Janet Kolodner
Students: Ganesh Bhat, Chandan Dasgupta, Jim Perkins
Kitchen Science Investigators
Demo Description: The KSI project is a test bed for exploring three sets of issues: (1) integration and sustainability of technology in learning environments, (2) development of children’s identities as scientific reasoners and thinkers, and (3) development of children’s science learning in a design-based non-formal learning environment. Participants join KSI because of interests in cooking and baking; they learn kitchen science and scientific reasoning in the context of perfecting recipes. We explore the issue of technology integration through the context of design and implementation of an after school/summer camp program in which elementary and middle school students learn science and scientific reasoning through cooking. We integrate the software into the activities and rituals of the learning environment to support learners in reflecting on and articulating their science understanding. The product of learners’ reflection and articulations are explanatoids (short explanations), stories, and annotated recipes that capture learners’ understanding of the science behind their cooking. These artifacts become a launching pad for students to externalize their understandings and talk with and share talk about the science behind their foods with their peers, families, and friends about the science they are learning in KSI. We explore sustainability of technology and the KSI program through partnering with local community organizations to continue offering the program once the research is over.
Faculty: Janet L. Kolodner
Students: Tammy L. Clegg, Christina Gardner
ELECTRONIC LEARNING COMMUNITIES LAB
Location – Room 322
Science Online: Knowledge Building in Wikis
Demo Description: What do people learn from writing on Wikipedia? How do young people learn to be smart about where information comes from? Science Online is a wiki-based learning environment where student authors construct articles about science topics. The site runs on the same software as Wikipedia, but with special extensions that support careful citation. By participating in the construction of a science resource for the public, students have a unique opportunity to reflect on where scientific information comes from and to engage with issues of epistemology and values in science.
Faculty: Amy Bruckman, asb@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Andrea Forte
Creative Collaboration in Online Flash Animation Communities
How do people with different skills and from different countries collaborate over the Internet to produce high-quality animated movies? To find out, we interviewed 31 animators from five 2D and 3D online animation communities and "screen scraped" over 27,000 forum threads to analyze for patters and trends. We found that leaders are heavily burdened and lack adequate technological support to help them design, manage, and complete successful collaborative projects. As a result, most of these projects fail. Based on our findings, we are designing two Web-based software tools to deploy in online animation communities. The first will support existing practices by scaffolding strong leadership and planning. The second will transform existing practices by facilitating dynamic leadership and improvisation. We plan to compare and contrast the processes and products generated by users of both systems to elicit broader principles of online creative collaboration.
Faculty: Amy Bruckman, asb@cc.gatech.edu
Student: Kurt Luther
IMAGINE LAB
Location: Room 323
Design Visualization:
A collection of projects ranging from Pre-Visualization Animations to Interactive Real Time Environments for the Georgia Aquarium, the Peachtree Corridor Taskforce, and Georgia Tech Campus will be shown. The Imagine Lab specializes in processing large datasets from a variety of sources to create urban scale 3D environments.
Faculty : Tolek Lesniewski; Jonathan Shaw
COMPUTER GRAPHICS
Animating Physics for Motion Pictures and Video Games
Location: Room 317 – Student Area
Artists who create motion pictures and video games often simulate physics to produce a variety of special effects. We display several results of simulated physics in order to make motion-picture-quality animations. Specifically, we animate gooey, viscoplastic materials like slime and putty, we simulate erosion and corrosion due to acid as it eats through metal, and we use state of the art optimization techniques in order to control simulated clothing on animated characters.
Faculty: Greg Turk
Students: Chris Wojtan
Performance- And Physics-Based Motion Control
Location: Room 319– Student Area
This project demonstrates the potential of using full body movement as an interface to control virtual avatars. Directly mapping human body's degrees of freedom onto a virtual avatar allows for intuitive and expressive control. However, this naive mapping fails quickly when the user attempts to control the avatar in an interaction with a virtual feature. The discrepancy between the virtual world and the real world can be even more problematic when the avatar and the virtual world are physically simulated. In this project, we explore an intelligent control framework that strikes a balance between a "literal" control scheme (avatar mimicking the exact joint angles of the human) and a "symbolic" control scheme (avatar performing a pre-scripted action regardless of the human motion). Our preliminary results show that the system gives the user free reign in controlling the movement of the avatar with respect to the kinematic and dynamic constraints in the virtual world.
Faculty: Karen Liu
Students: Satoru Ishigaki, Timmy White
MAGIC LAB
Location: Room 321
The corner table representation is a compact representation for triangle meshes. We have extended the compact corner table to tetrahedral meshes. A new set of operators have been defined to aid in traversing the tetrahedral mesh. This corner table has a new feature where vertex to triangle/tetrahedra lookup is possible using no additional information.
Faculty: Jarek Rossignac
Student: Topraj Gurung
INTERACTIVE MEDIA TECHNOLOGY CENTER
IMTC is a sister center to GVU co-located on the third floor of TSRB. IMTC undertakes research and development projects in areas similar to GVU, with a more commercial, short-term focus. We collaborate closely with GVU on a number of projects. IMTC is pleased to present some demos of IMTC/GVU collaborative projects as well as a sampling of other work.
DARPA ASSIST (Advanced Soldier Sensor Information Systems Technology)
Location - 311B
ASSIST is a hardware and software solution that helps soldiers on patrol gather information, generate intelligence, create reports on the spot in the field, and share intelligence in real-time with other soldiers in the field and back at the base. We will be showing a prototype hardware capture platform, as well as ASISSTView, a visual tool to rapidly search data, find events of interest, and generate reports.
Faculty: Ed Price, Peter Presti, Jeremy Johnson, Thad Starner
Students: Tracy Westyn, David Minnen, Dan Ashbrook, Chris Howse, Nirmal Patel
Millennium Gate
Location – Room 309
The Millennium gate is a 73 foot high Monumental Arch being built in Atlantic Station in midtown Atlanta, the largest brownfield redevelopment site in the US. IMTC is developing interactive visitor technology for inclusion in the museum in the base of the gate, showcasing the history of Atlanta and the influence of philanthropy on the development of Atlanta and the other great cities in the US. A prototype of the system will be on display. The Gate opens in Spring 2008.
Faculty: Brian Jones, Scott Robertson, Tiffany O'Quinn, Maribeth Gandy, Peter Presti, Jeff Wilson
Others: Althea Brown, Nadia Christie
