Projects

Here are a few projects I’m currently or was recently involved with:

Ubuntu Manual Project

Ubuntu Manual Project: The Ubuntu Manual Project aims to create a beginner’s guide for the Ubuntu operating system.

Tufte-LaTeX

Tufte-LaTEX classes: LaTEX document classes in Tuftian style. I joined an open source project started by Bil Kleb and Bill Wood to create LaTEX document classes that were based on the design of Edward Tufte’s books and handouts.

Narcissus

Narcissus: An algorithm for robot self-detection. Jesse Lane and I developed an algorithm for robot self-detection for a developmental robotics course we were taking. We wrote a two-page student abstract that was accepted at the AAAI 2006 conference. Our classmates voted this as the top project in the course.

Project Icarus

Icarus: Flying in Virtual Reality. This was another class project—this time I worked with Jesse Lane and Ethan Slattery. The course was titled “Computational Perception”. We used infrared cameras to detect the movements of people and wrote a small virtual reality application that they could fly through by flapping their arms. Our classmates voted this as the top project in the course.

ISEK

ISEK: A sociable robot. The Iowa State Engineering Kids is an outreach program in the engineering department at Iowa State University. Camille Schroeder commissioned the Iowa State Robotics Club to build a small robot that could serve as an ambassador at the FIRST Lego League competition in 2005.

Librarything-to-BibTeX

LibraryThing to BibTEX: Generates a BibTEX file from the books in your LibraryThing collection.

Shiny Happy Users

Shiny Happy Users: A collection of usability essays. In 2007, I took a course from Derrick Parkhurst titled “Scientific Methods in Human Computer Interaction” in which each student had to present a short (5–10 minutes) presentation about that week’s topic. At the end of the course, we took our favorite presentations and blog entries and published them in a book: Shiny Happy Users. In addition to contributing a few essays, I designed the interior of the book.

TagNinja

TagNinja: Using collective (human) computing to disambiguate word senses. Jesse Lane and I collaborated on this project for a computational linguistics course. The project was an attempt to create a game that people would enjoy playing but that would also be contributing data to improve word-sense disambiguation algorithms. By choosing which definition best matches the highlighted word in the sentence, the players are teaching the computer how to better understand English.