Different Words is a software I created as part of a challenge given to me by a company I was applying to. It is a word processing software that takes text and transforms it into a infographic as shown below.

The program gathers all unique words in the given text and does three things

1. Orders them lexicographically. The columns are ordered by the first letter and the rest by the remaining letters in each word
2. Identifies each word and tries to bucket it into one of four categories: Noun, Verb, Adjective, Other. There is also not found for those that can be identified (like typos or other strange words).

It is made in FLEX running on AIR.

Recently I led a studio in TEI’11 and I presented a very small robot I created. It is composed of a Seeeduino film, two pager motors and two light dependent resistors. It was a challenge to create it because it is so small and fragile. It follows light when reflected over the table.

It has two light sensors in the front. It compares the light values and instructs the motors to head to the side where there is the most light. If they are very similar, the robot just moves forward.

The Redesign of the Snackbot GUI was the assignment for the lab part of Methods, at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). For this reason some of the paths followed or decisions taken were  made to fit the course requirements.

What is snackbot?

From www.snackbot.org

Snackbot is a mobile robot, about the size of a very small human, that rolls around on wheels, and will be delivering snacks to students, faculty, and office workers at Carnegie Mellon University. A Snackbot research team of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from more than three departments at Carnegie Mellon created Snackbot as a platform for studying human-robot interaction in the real world.

Snackbot is meant as an ongoing platform for research. The Snackbot will support research into robust autonomous operation in office environments. Our efforts range from multi-sensor fusion algorithms for perception, reasoning about dynamic spaces,communicating with people through verbal and non-verbal mechanisms, and planning with incomplete information.

In order for the snackbot to be used as a research platform or even just to deliver cookies, it needs humans to program it’s behaviour. This way, the software developers created three interfaces for researchers to create head animations, mouth animations and dialog trees. All of these interface’s outputs were stackable. For instance, a mouth animation would be created and saved. This file would be fed into the head animation GUI so that it is merged with it. This file was then saved to a single file that would be finally fed into the dialog tree GUI.

The task

Our task was to design a software workflow that assists researchers create human-like expressions and animations for Snackbot. The proposed workflow will improve the productivity and efficiency of researchers creating animations and expressions for Snackbot.

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Parents face a problem when kids leave their houses. One of which is decluttering. Part of this problem is knowing what the child wants to keep or not.

The orbanizer consists on an orb with a screen in the back that  supports parents and their children with the decluttering process. On the opposing side of the screen (the orb’s top) there is a camera.

Both the parents and the children have an orb. When the parents wants to declutter they use the orb to take pictures of objects and make an initial decision about that objects destiny.  By default there are three options: Throw away, give away and put way.

When the parent finishes the tagging process these are sent to the child orb that starts glowing. The child can then agree or disagree with the parent decision. These decisions are then sent to the parents that now know exactly what they should do with those items.

This project was an assignment for the Methods course at CMU.

About

The objective for this project was to create a device that could print graphical elements into a surface that had the ability to erase itself.

To do this, I explored the potential of a photochomatic ink. This special kind of ink, also found in sun glasses, has the ability to change color when exposed to UV light. In my case, it is blue when UV light is present, and while when it is not. The speed at which the effect dissipates depends on the color. Mine is blue and it fades away in about 2 or 3 seconds.

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In order to study the performance of capacitive sensing I created a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) style of controller. It performs just like an NES controller but uses capacitive sensing pads instead of buttons. In order for it to interface with the computer I used a keyboard interface. However, since the system is modular it can be swapped for a real NES controller or any other input.

This would allow me to test the repetition of strokes of capacitive sensing pads while the users were having fun playing a game. It was developed as part of the research for my final thesis for my Master in Computer Science.

Many times I came to a situation where I required a circuit that was neater and more compact. Either the space is too small or I have a whole load of wires to fuss. Or even something that I just want to keep intact for some time.

I encountered many obstacles like this on my project for my Master in CS (I’ll blog about this project in a few months).So I searched many sources and asked many opinions… I chewed it all up and came to a process that works for me. This does not mean it’s the best but, it’s the best for my needs.

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The Drama School Posters were part of an assignment of Communication Design Fundamentals at CMU. The objective was to explore a Hot and a Cold pallet. I think they came out pretty cool.

As part of an assignment for Communication Design Fundamentals I developed an Infographic in isometric view.

The Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) in CMU  needed to get pictures of their Faculty, Staff and Students as an attempt to create a board. To help on this Michelle Gittleman (Director’s Office of HCII) asked me to conduct a photo session where people would volunteer to have their picture taken.

After a sum of 9 hours—split between two days—I took 120 photos.

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