Projects

Exposure to diverse opinions makes us more informed and engages society in a necessary deliberation process. Inwardly focused groups risk tunnel vision and an inability to challenge their own views. Technically, online we can connect to anyone in the world but social network analyses of blogs and Twitter have shown that we stay connected in groups of like-minded others. There is untapped potential here for online environments to go further towards giving more access to diverse views. Incivility has direct consequences for relationships with others of different opinions.
The goal of this project is to expand on the work done by Pamela Pryor and Jo Edwards (curators of the BellSouth calendar project), to remember, celebrate, and preserve stories of African Americans and Black-owned institutions in Georgia. The project consists of two parts an interactive exhibit and digital application. The exhibit and interactive installation will be located at the APEX (African-American Panoramic Experience) Museum in Atlanta, Georgia.
The BellSouth Calendar project was originally curated by Pamela Pryor and Jo Edwards. The purpose of the project is to expand on this work, remembering these narratives, and celebrate these individuals from the community. The project has two components: an interactive exhibit that will be on display at the APEX Museum(African-American Panoramic Experience) and the second is a website that will allow teachers, students, and community members to learn more.
In the U.S. alone, approximately 18 million people use crutches each year. The human body was not designed to bear its weight on the forearms and wrists, but all designs of the crutch force patients to do just this. In just a few steps with the underarm crutch, forearm fatigue sets in resulting in patients resting upon the underarm padding. The upward force from the padding leads to pain, chafing, blood vessel compression, nerve compression, and possible nerve damage.
Visualizations can help amplify human cognition. In an era where networks are becoming increasingly complex, the desirability of tools to compare and contrast sets, relationships, and reach is significant. Motivated by a practical need articulated by corporate decision makers, this research presents our journey in designing and implementing bicentric diagrams, a novel graph-based set visualization technique. A bicentric diagram enables simultaneous identification of sets, set relationships, and set member reach in integrated ego networks of two focal entities.
A social media application that aims to bridge the gaps between those with asthma and caregivers, family, and friends. Users create, share, and send virtual birthday cakes which other members of the community can contribute candles too. This application is educational and is made in collaboration with the CHEST society. 
We introduce Bit Whisperer, an ad-hoc short-range wireless communication system that enables "walk up and share" data transmissions with "good enough" security.
We present a method for smoothly blending between existing liquid animations. We introduce a semi-automatic method for matching two existing liquid animations, which we use to create new fluid motion that plausibly interpolates the input. Our contributions include a new space-time non-rigid iterative closest point algorithm that incorporates user guidance, a sub-sampling technique for efficient registration of meshes with millions of vertices, and a fast surface extraction algorithm that produces 3D triangle meshes from a 4D space-time surface.
Modern social media do a remarkable job of keeping friends and families connected‚ often across the globe. Yet, these same systems also overlook the communities and neighborhoods where we live our daily lives. In this paper, we present BlockParty, a platform for building hyper-local social computing applications aimed at neighborhoods. A key feature of our platform is that it runs on top of residential wireless routers via an underlying mesh network. Using BlockParty, people can socialize with their neighbors and share resources, without their data ever leaving their local community.
Most high-speed non-invasive BCI typing systems require intense visual attention and feedback. BrainBraille investigates a more open-loop approach similar to touch typing. BrainBraille enables communication at 20 characters per minute (cpm) by monitoring attempted movements in the motor cortex. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Users attempt to tense the muscles for six body parts: the hands, the feet, the tongue, and the gluteus maximus. Those actions activate the corresponding six regions of the motor cortex, which map to the six dots in a Braille cell.
In the era of globalization, the ordinary viewer is exposed to cinematography from different countries and cultures, but does one understand the cultural context portrayed by the artists? In this project, I intend to use interactive television as a medium, that helps the viewer to gain a deeper understanding of a movie, by exposing him/her to its cultural layers.
This project aims to reduce the barriers present in grandchild-grandparent communication by developing a messaging tool which encourages users to exchange tidbits from each of their lives, cultures, and generations. Additionally, this tool can be used by users who are hard of hearing or who have a language barrier.
How do we understand sex difference for sex-balanced pre-clinical research? It is critical to acknowledge and include the difference in clinical research because we don't all have same bodies. We seek to bring this conversation of inclusion to Reproductive Justice Advocates and Molecular Biologists through a conversational web narrative. They will see each other's ideas and vocabularies, coming to an understanding and cornerstone for future dialogue.
Static visualizations have analytic and expressive value. However, many interactive tasks cannot be completed using static visualizations. As datasets grow in size and complexity, static visualizations start losing their analytic and expressive power for interactive data exploration. Despite this limitation of static visualizations, there are still many cases where visualizations are limited to being static (e.g., visualizations on presentation slides or posters). We believe in many of these cases, static visualizations will benefit from allowing users to perform interactive tasks on them.

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