computing for the greater good
If you are interested in doing research with us, please check out these projects. You can also feel free to propose your own project idea. All of these projects will be supervised by Gillian as part of the ubicomp prototyping class or as part of an independent study, but a lot of other faculty and graduate students are involved. I list them where I can, and you should feel free to talk to them about the projects as well. These projects are listed in no particular order... so please read them all.
Brainstorm Board
(with David Nguyen and Andre van Der Hoek)
Brainstorming is a collaborative activity. The Brainstorm Board is a large group display that will connect to participants' laptops (local and remote) to foster brainstorming. Our current exploration uses mindmaps (also called concept maps) as the underlying mechanism for brainstorming. Development will involve retooling an open-source, single-user java application to be multi-user.
Nomatic*VS
(with Mo Monabi, Donald Patterson, and Nick Noack)
Visual schedules and choice boards are tools used in current best practices for helping children with autism and other special needs. These non-verbal kids need help communicating their choices, understanding time and activities, and so on. We are working with Windows SmartPhone, Linux small displays, and large touchscreen-enabled platforms to develop solutions that ease these burdens, provide logging and visualizations of data, and help automate some of the features of using these communication techniques. Development might involve working with any of these devices using python, java and/or C#. We may also use RFID and other sensor technologies to expand into the physical world from these displays.
Mopix
(with Silvia Lindtner, Judy Chen, and Paul Dourish)
This project is all about location-aware photo sharing. Public displays might be distributed throughout an urban environment, a campus, or a building that allow people to share pictures from their mobile phones. The goal is to build communities through mobile photo-blogging. Development work will be done on a variety of mobile phone platforms.
Conrad Navigation
(with Nick Noack, Sam Kauffman, and Donald Patterson)
Use small displays around the building to provide context information. The navigation application guides visitors to offices and people following colored arrows that pop up on small displays throughout the halls. Development work will be done using Nokia n800 devices, linux, python and java.
Second Life ICS
(with Crista Lopes)
Did you know there is a second life Donald Bren Hall on Anteater Island? Spend some time there building widgets that match our real Donald Bren Hall and prototyping new cool interactions that we might someday make into ubicomp applications in the real world.
Smart Blocks and UbiPlay
(with Silvia Lindtner)
Ubicomp play and smart blocks projects involve building sensing into toys. Using these sensors, we can model what children and adults are doing while interacting with physical playthings and represent them in the digital world. This practice might enable new forms of design, new ways to track childhood development over time, and better interventions for teaching and encouraging play for education and development. This project involves design, development on both hardware and software platforms.
Conrad Office Awareness
(with Nick Noack and Donald Patterson)
Use small displays around the building to foster awareness of office activities. These displays will show location, status, activities, announcements, and any social context the office owner wants. They will also provide a place to leave and read messages between the office owner and people stopping by. Development work will be done using Nokie n800 devices, linux, python and java.
Social Stories
(with Khai Truong from Univ. of Toronto and Brian Landry from Georgia Tech)
Social stories are a way to teach children with special needs about appropriate behavior in social situations. Teachers and parents often struggle to create these stories from scratch. In this project, you will evaluate current out-of-the box digital storytelling and comic book creation technologies and then create new or adapt one of these tools to facilitate social story creation.
MedReader
(with autism researchers and medical informatics)
Patients and caregivers alike struggle with reading complicated medical reports. This project aims to support this practice by automatically recognizing characters, trends, and keywords in these medical reports and teaching patients about them by linking to online resources, facilitating word lookups and more. Development will likely be done in Java but can be flexible.
Location Enabled Games
Glofun has created a development kit for creating "hidden worlds" called LEGs for Location Enabled Games. Bring your own fun ideas and create new games, performances, and interesting experiences on and with mobile phones.
Mobile Music
(potentially with researchers from Intel and Nokia)
Openstrands has created the mystrands open source services that can integrate music playing and recommendations into mobile applications. Building on work done at both Intel and Nokia, you can use these services to create next-generation music playing and recommendation services on the mobile platform. Of particular interest are applications that allow friends to play each other's music, recommend things to each other, and negotiate what gets played in a group setting.