Category Archives: Research

retro-future

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I’m pretty bad at drawing but this image stuck with me from the Graduation Show and I decided to make a sketch because I wasn’t really happy with my photos. This is a ‘back-to-the-future’ scene in more ways than one: head-mounted displays give me a strong sense of nostalgia for the early 1990s when they were all the rage in VR research. Of course, HMDs have been around since the 1960s, but only the military (or those with military research grants) could afford to build or buy them. In the mid-1980s HMDs started to be more widely available commercially, though still at pricetags so high only the best funded labs could afford to p(l)ay. That era has long passed: by the late 1990s the HMD, like the VR ‘Cave’, came to be considered a bit of a dinosaur by the HCI research community, who tend to be much more interested in less brute-force display techniques that don’t obliterate the wonderful natural sense of sight. Besides being impressed by the shiny technology and beautiful kimono, a child might wonder why the model seems to be engaging in a solo session of  blind man’s buff. In the 1990s, HCI researchers were wondering the same thing. Many came to the conclusion that blind man’s buff, while fun, might not be a good interaction metaphor.

Recently, on the other hand, there are rumours Google will soon release hardware ‘Google goggles’ allowing flâneurs to search the Internet while on a stroll and show the results with a lightweight see-through display. That will be pretty cool. Not really new though, either. I first saw someone doing this (or claim so) at a conference in the early-mid-1990s. There’s good reason to believe that it was at least partly a fashion statement and, more likely than not, only partly functional at that time. But if Google’s hardware works well and is affordable, it will be cool indeed. You don’t want to know the price of an HMD of the VR ilk.

p5js doodle

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Epicycles & Visual Music

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I spent some time this evening looking again at the motion of particles moving along epicyclic trajectories. The motion of a single particle q in the complex plane, z, is given by the following parametric function of t:

z_{q}(t) = Re^{i\omega_{q} t} - re^{i\Omega_{q} t} \;\;\; with \; \Omega_{q} > \omega_{q}, \;\; R > r

The animation above is generated using 50 particles moving according to the same parametric equation, with angular velocities given as integer multiples of a fundamental value:

\omega_{q} = q \omega_{1}, \;\;\; \Omega_{q} = q \Omega_{1}, \;\;\; q = 1, 2, 3 \cdots

With the velocities distributed in this way, the angular positions attain various kinds of harmonic relations, whence the arrangement of the particles in the complex plane falls into simple symmetric patterns. The animation bears some resemblance to the visual music of James and John Whitney. In his later work John Whitney made use of digital computer programs to create visual music animations (Whitney, 1981), using particle systems related to the one described here.

[1] John Whitney, Digital Harmony: On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art , New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc., (1981).

Singing with your Hands

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Currently reported on Gizmodo: friend and collaborator Prof. Sidney Fels, University of British Columbia, and part of his team describe their work on using hand gestures to control speech and singing synthesis. Those interviewed in the video, including Sid, graduate student, Johnty Wang, Prof. Bob Pritchard (School of Music, UBC), professional classical vocalist Marguerite Witvoet are some the people I enjoy hanging out with when I attend the annual NIME conference, which Sid and I co-founded in 2001.

The video contains demos and an excerpt from a vocal performance by Marguerite.

Finding Physics in Everyday Objects

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Finding Physics in Everyday Objects from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

I spent part of the summer of 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, attending a month-long workshop for young scientists organized by the Santa Fe Institute, a research center for complexity science. Out of the dozens of interesting young scholars participating, the most memorable is certainly Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan who was a senior graduate student at the time and now works as a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. Maha, as he instructed us to call him, also works in physics and mechanical engineering.

In the video above, you can listen to Maha linking patterning in nanotubes with the wrinkling of elephant trunks, sharing his deep intuition about the physical world in such a gentle way that even the non-mathematically inclined can appreciate the rich beauty and poetry of his approach to understanding natural phenomena. Listen also to his fascinating explanation of the difficulty of folding maps, a solution found in natural systems, and an approach devised by Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura for folding large solar panels in space travel.

In Sanskrit, the word maha means great, which seems an appropriate way to describe Prof. Mahadevan.

 

What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?

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This is a topic of general importance to everyone in the seminar. No doubt you have had the opportunity to make use of the information in the Wikipedia for your homework or research. You have also, no doubt, observed some of your professors (including me) sometimes cite the Wikipedia. The ones who don’t may be using the Wikipedia privately without admitting so publicly. The fact of the matter is the Wikipedia is a very convenient and often compelling source of information about most common topics, and a wide range of uncommon ones too. But is the Wikipedia a valid source for studying or conducting research? Let’s see what that venerable institution, Harvard University, which ranks at the top of most rankings of academic institutions, has to say about the matter. When I was an undergraduate student, Harvard was my dream graduate school and, in fact, I  was accepted into the Harvard PhD program. But I found my guru elsewhere so, finally, I did not enroll at Harvard. However, when it comes to academic policy, one can do much worse than have a look at what Harvard does. In Harvard University’s official pages on using sources we find the following statement (page accessed 20.02.2012):

There’s nothing more convenient than Wikipedia if you’re looking for some quick information, and when the stakes are low (you need a piece of information to settle a bet with your roommate, or you want to get a basic sense of what something means before starting more in-depth research), you may get what you need from Wikipedia. In fact, some instructors may advise their students to read entries for scientific concepts on Wikipedia as a way to begin understanding those concepts.

Nevertheless, when you’re doing academic research, you should be extremely cautious about using Wikipedia. As its own disclaimer states, information on Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration. Users may be reading information that is outdated or that has been posted by someone who is not an expert in the field or by someone who wishes to provide misinformation. (Case in point: Four years ago, an Expos student who was writing a paper about the limitations of Wikipedia posted a fictional entry for himself, stating that he was the mayor of a small town in China. Four years later, if you type in his name, or if you do a subject search on Wikipedia for mayors of towns in China, you will still find this fictional entry.) Some information on Wikipedia may well be accurate, but because experts do not review the site’s entries, there is a considerable risk in relying on this source for your essays.

The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to use basic reference materials when you’re trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the library is stocked with introductory materials, and the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you’re writing about.

 

This position on the use of the Wikipedia as a source is fairly close to my own opinion. I would explicitly add, however, that no source should be categorically excluded. To do so is the equivalent of burning (or banning) certain books – the sign of an authoritarian, or at least, elitist mindset. Instead, what is needed (when using any source, for that matter) is the ability to evaluate the quality and reliability of the source. Within the Wikipedia itself, you will find a broad spectrum of reliability. One of the merits of regularly using (and preferably contributing in some way) to the Wikipedia, is that this offers a training ground for honing one’s ability to evaluate the quality of a source.

As a guideline I encourage using the Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic and pointers to the primary and secondary literature on a topic. But it should not be your only entry point into the literature and certainly not the final source you consult. Moreover, one needs to constantly bear in mind the nature of the Wikipedia, the manner in which information is added, and the inherent limitations. The standard of articles seems to vary significantly by topic. Articles in rapidly developing technical areas such as computer science and media technology can be of fairly high quality, often containing information and citations to current primary sources that cannot be found in more archival media such as books or journals, as these suffer publication lag. At the other end of the spectrum are articles about controversial topics such as political disputes. In these cases, it may be more instructive to read the behind-the-scenes disputes (talk pages) about what is to be included or excluded from the main article, than it is to read the article itself, because this offers a quick look at various conflicting viewpoints.

In summary, the Wikipedia is a novel and exciting development in the cooperative   organization and communication of knowledge. It remains to be seen what it will become, but the Wikipedia is worthy of our attention and should not be banned or dismissed offhand.