Matt's Idea Box

I had the good fortune to attend one day of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting a couple of weekends ago. If you haven’t heard of this, it is the largest gathering of neuroscientists and general brain geeks on the planet. I’m talking about 30,000 of them packed in to one convention center. It’s quite a sight. It’s actually quite humbling, and is a reminder how little a neuroscience hobbyist like me really knows. But that being said, I got to go around and see some really interesting posters on work being done with optogenetics (exciting and silencing neurons using light) in Dr. Ed Boyden’s lab at MIT. I think this research has a ton of potential for brain-computer interfaces. Also, I got to talk to a PhD student in Neuroscience at USC. It was really interesting to hear about the work they are doing to investigate the hippocampus, with the eventual goal of creating a prosthetic hippocampus(!!!).

I received some exciting news when I found out that a place right near my house was hiring. Once seeing that, I applied, interviewed, and got the job. So I have gone from working in Hollywood to working in Whittier. The digs aren’t quite as nice, but the commute has gone from 3 hours to 3 minute…and that’s just heavenly. And as an added bonus, I get to spend more time developing.

I successfully presented my thesis work at the IASTED-HCI conference in Maui. What a trip! Hawaii was absolutely beautiful and my hosts were a true delight. I have to admit is was a little challenging making it to the conference activities with all of the fun things to do in Maui. But I got to meet some really interesting people and see some really interesting work that is being done.

I’ve been a little lax in updating this blog lately, so I’m going to try to catch up with a few posts in a row.

I just received word that my NoodleNav paper was accepted to my first ever conference, the IASTED-HCI conference in Maui from August 23rd to the 25th. Needless to say, I am excited.

I just finished attending the Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference in Washington DC. There were a number of good classes being held and I now have a better picture of how to pop Yardi’s hood and bend it to my will. If you have never heard of Yardi, it is the premier property management software solution…in case you were curious. As a side note, I am posting this from 35,000 feet as I fly back home. I love technology.

In case anyone is curious about seeing the system I created for my thesis in action, I have posted it for all to use.

You can try it out here.

Screenshot of NoodleNav

It requires that your web browser has the Adobe Flash player installed and that you have a webcam available for it to use (it has to track your head gestures somehow!). The main idea is that you train it by clicking the train camera button, then place your head in the box indicated (kind of a dumb training algorithm, but for now it serves its purpose), then click done. It will take a snapshot and then lock on, once you see the small box appear, hopefully around you eyes and nose area, then it will track the direction you look. This then gets translated in to panning movements on the underlying Google Maps that corresponds to the direction you turn your head. I have plans to enhance this proof of concept, but this is what I used for my thesis, so enjoy!

In December of 2009, I successfully defended my thesis to satisfy the requirements for a Master of Science degree in Computer Science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  It has been posted on their digital commons library in electronic format for all to see.

 The link is here.

The system that I created actually used Flex/Flash along with Google Maps and a webcam to control panning in Google Maps with head turn. It ended up working decently well, and with some practice people ended up being faster and more accurate, in the evaluation tasks, with head gestures than with a touchpad on a laptop…interesting! The following is the abstract, to give you a little better idea of what the thesis is about:

Abstract

New, often free, spatial information applications such as mapping tools, topological imaging, and geographic information systems are becoming increasingly available to the average computer user. These systems, which were once available only to government, scholastic, and corporate institutions with highly skilled operators, are driving a need for new and innovative ways for the average user to navigate and control spatial information intuitively, accurately, and efficiently. Gestures provide a method of control that is well suited to navigating the large datasets often associated with spatial information applications. Several different types of gestures and different applications that navigate spatial data are examined. This leads to the introduction of a system that uses a visual head tracking scheme for controlling of the most common navigation action in the most common type of spatial information application, panning a 2-D map. The proposed head tracking scheme uses head pointing to control the direction of panning. The head tracking control is evaluated against the traditional control methods of the mouse and touchpad, showing a significant performance increase over the touchpad and comparable performance to the mouse, despite limited practice with head tracking.

And with this post, I christen thee….my blog.  It is fully my intention to place interesting projects/work, papers, and news related to me on this blog for all to see.  It may be long stretches between updates, and sometimes they may come in bunches, but I want to share my ideas with the world, so here goes nothing….