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What can you do with Unmanned Aerial Systems?

  February 3, 2015 ,

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) is a very broad topic. Part of my role as a student innovation fellow is to build and experiment with UAS, with the goal of developing a “Manual” for UAS use at Georgia State. The manual will include both safety and technical information, as well as some basic flight instruction and guidelines for use. To that end, my post today will consist of a pretty “stream of consciousness” discussion of what is available and what is possible with unmanned aerial systems in a University setting. I will also go over the differences in the various types of UAS and their pros and cons. The reason I ask this is, is that I have a somewhat narrow focus when it comes to the use of these aircraft. I want to know what sort of ideas you can come up for using Unmanned Aerial Systems in a University setting. Aerial Photography or Videography is the primary use of most UAS in academic or research settings. There are many different variations on this role. Cinematographers and photographers have been using UAS to achieve an airborne perspective with low cost in many fields including journalism, entertainment and real estate. Other Colleges and Universities are using them on sports fields to analyze athletic performance from a new perspective. Governments and utilities have used cameras in the air to perform critical infrastructure inspections, and still others have used small unmanned aircraft to survey large swaths of land with high resolution aerial imagery. … Continue reading

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New Semester–Same Exciting Projects

  February 3, 2015 , ,

Hey Guys! *long sigh of relief* Finally on the other side of a flu storm that started last week. The other good news is that I get to give you guys some updates on all the projects I’ve been working on. Let’s start with the Digital Signage Project: I turned in a final prototype for the Digital Signage Project to the Exchange to start the process of getting it on campus. It’s been a long road with that project but it’s worked out great! Both hands can be used to interact with the objects, but only the right hand can interact with the arrows that cycle through the different models. It will be very easy to add more models as we need them–I just need to drop a few files, add a few lines of code, and recompile the project to a flash drive. The colors and fonts used in the project are all official Georgia State University colors and fonts, and we even have our own official logo for the SIF program! If you guys get a chance, go play with this project at the Exchange and send in any feedback! It’s a basic prototype right now, but with time it can be expanded to do more! My main focus the past few weeks has been split between the 3D Atlanta project and the new NextEngine Scanners we have at CURVE. NextEngine Scanners: These things are great! They do a great job at getting small objects scanned in at … Continue reading

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Filling in the gaps

  February 3, 2015 ,

Project: Online Deliberation Mapping Tool Development Before we start implementing the project, we need to decide the timelines and milestones so that the product can evolve in a systematic fashion. To do this, we needed to prioritize the features and decide which features are going to be in the version 1.0 of the product. Further, we needed to fill in the gaps, that is, those aspects of the tool which may not be features per se but would be necessary for the product to be functional. The priority features for the version 1.0 are :- Structure of display of the posts would be in a tree line fashion. We tried time line representation and concentric circle representations and various flavors of tree representations, finally we decided to go with a tree model which would make the deliberation intuitive to follow and easy to contribute to. An approximate sketch of the tree representation is :- Time slider : Users entering the conversation should be able to see the state of the deliberation at any previous point in time. Types of connections between posts. A reply to a post can be of neutral, agree or disagree type. These will be represented by different colored edges connecting the appropriate posts. Another distinct color will be allocated for edges representing connection between a post and a question to that post. There should be visual cues to the annotations to a post. We came up with a name “annotaticons” for such visual cues. Subsequent questions that arose during design … Continue reading

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Learning from a Legend

  February 1, 2015

This week I was able to shadow a great musician and filmmaker from Malaysia named Pete Teo (google him). He is a Chinese born Malaysian and I really got to learn a lot from him. His journey that led him to film started as a music composer, to songwriter, to musician, to actor, to filmmaker, and now organic farmer. I kid you not that is my same journey. Before I met Pete I was shopping for an organic coffee farm.  So here are some of the take aways from our conversations. 1. As a filmmaker, it doesn’t matter what equipment you use. It can be a cel phone, an ipad, a digital camera, or even a camera that shoots on 35mm. Whatever it is you use to record media will add to the effect or character of your film. The media you use says the time period you live in as well as many other things such as social class. This part of our conversation reminded me of my film theory classes whereby we learned that the camera is actually a character and not just a mechanical device. 2. Pete’s films are political. He is a reformer and wants to see his country united. As a  result, he has been questioned and followed by the secret police of Malaysia. He released 15 short films on the internet 2 days apart and gained instant fame. His first film had 15 million views in less than two days. He broke a record … Continue reading

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Playing around with data visualization and early modern texts

  January 26, 2015 , ,

As the Hoccleve project nears our first major milestone, the digital publication of an edition of Hoccleve’s holograph poems, we are beginning to ask questions about how to transform our XML into an HTML display. Thus, we are embarking on a graph design/display phase of our work. One of the things we have been discussing is creating data visualizations of the poems as an ornament to the edition. Most likely, these will be simple. Word clouds for instance. I have been asked to explore some options for this. This is not something that I have done before, but it is something that I have been curious about as a tool for my own work. Because the plain text versions of the poems weren’t quite ready, I decided to take a little time to begin explore what might be possible, from a historical perspective, with data visualization tools. I also figured it would make an interesting first blog post of the semester, even if at this point my foray into data visualization and data mining is completely amateurish. Even so, I am reporting on some early experiments using Voyant, a free web-based tool for textual analysis. I want to to see how it worked with early modern texts and with some of the documents I am using for my dissertation. This post is also offered in the spirit of a simple review of the software. My dissertation is a study of relations of power between the English and Native Americans in colonial … Continue reading