Design Perceptive

Here are some interesting links for the week!

Monday

Ok, like many people Monday is a frantically-paced rush to get back into the swing of the weekly routine after a weekend of mayhem, err…rest.  Like many people I get my coffee on in the morning.  I tell you now that I like coffee.  I often seek out the best coffee houses in whatever areas I frequent so know where to get it.  I may drink it a little too much though and, apparently, get less effect because I’ve habituated my body to the caffeine.  Well, here’s aninteresting article from Alex Holcombe’s blog on how to optimize your coffee consumption.  Happy sipping!

Tuesday

It’s TED talk Tuesday again.  This time it’s a little more of the other side of the brain.  Here’s Imogen Heap singing at TED.  Sweetness.

Wednesday

It is HUMP-DAY!  Right smack in the middle of the week.  It’s a good time to talk about balance.  This Study Hacks article Freestyle Productivity: Balancing Systems and Simplicity When Organizing Your Life talks about using the right tools for the job.  In this author’s recommendation, high-tech tools that that are highly structured are best for capturing information and low-tech, freestyle tools are best for planning.

Personally, I like high-tech, freestyle tools that allow you to make your own structures as you need them, such as WordPress, Google Calendar (Docs, etc.), Microsoft Onenote – especially those that use tags.

Thursday

Another video for you to watch.  This one, from Make is Heather Knight of JPL talking about sociable robots.  It’s about six minutes and simply talks about her background and some about why sociable robots might be helpful to astronauts on long-haul missions.

Friday

The Quantum Lobe Chronicles provides our Light Reading for the weekend with this article Bye bye modular, hello cognit.  It’s about a paradigm shift in thinking about how the brain is organized.  It talks about postulates of J.M. Fuster who, in 2006, coined the term cognit as a basic unit of memory or knowledge.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

A $150 Xylophone from EBay

For this project to support research in the area of computational creativity, we’re building a robotic xylophone.  Well, we’ve got the approval for funding and the xylophone has been ordered.  Naturally, this is exciting!  This means that soon, we’ll be opening a box like children at birthday parties, putting it together and playing with it.  It might actually get a little loud around the 2nd floor of Nedderman Hall for a few.

Now, the next order of business is to settle on the solenoids and get those ordered as well.  Perhaps, we’ll get one to test our construction ideas.  Brandon Skinner has agreed to help put together the controller.  His help is greatly appreciated!

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From Scientific American magazine
5 Future Robotics Expeditions and What They Could Reveal.
This is a slight misnomer.  The only future robot is the Mars Science Laboratory.  The remaining have been already launched.  Yet, they are still on their respective journeys to their destinations.

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This was my Tuesday-morning Ted Talk watching experience this week.  It resonates with my current interests in Computation Creativity.  It’s a brief lecture by Tim Brown running about 28 minutes long.  He talks about play in the form of exploration, building and role-playing and their roles in creativity.  You should take a gander when you have the time.

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We here at Design Perceptive are always interested in the way humans perceive things.  It gives us direction and clues in designing towards artificial perceptive agents.  So, the interest here is to ask how and why do perceptual illusions work?  Consider the illusion in this article – The importance of perceptual illusion research from Cognitive Daily.

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The brain is amazing.   I really think many people (members of the medical/scientific community excepted) misunderstand how amazingly robust the brain really is.  This article in this Neurophilosophy blog shows how the brain can just keep going and going and going.

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I love the Study Hacks blog.  This article address the age old problem of procrastination and analysis paralysis.  I’ve run across this problem.  You most likely have as well.  Almost all of the classes in my major have semester projects, but this Ice-bath method could be applied to individual homework assignments as well.

I want to try something new at UTA that takes a look at creativity.  This is a grassroots startup of a multidisciplinary project to explore how creativity develops by looking into the research field of computational creativity.  It probably isn’t ground-breaking.  In fact, I’ve seen others do work in this area.  But, this might be an interesting platform to get others involved in AI, to help expand AI research at UTA, etc.

So, specifically, I want to take this:	And wire it up with these:
A $150 Xylophone from EBay	A Powerful 12VDC - 24VDC Solenoid

The solenoids would be used as strikers which would be controlled by a computer program.  I envision the program exploring its range of motions that result in notes, chords and sequences.  I want to explore different models of how a system might learn what sounds good and what doesn’t.  I want to explore models of learning structure.

I want, foremost, to provide a platform for people who are interested in doing the same.

I like the concept of a minimalism when it comes to the home. It appeals to the senses by simplicity. And, in my opinion, one characteristic of a minimalist home is that it requires minimal effort to run and maintain. In other words, it is very hands off. So, I’ve been working with intelligent control systems, adding them as I can. Recently, I installed a simple timer-based irrigation system for my garden and patio.

Now, I’ve started looking at controls for the HVAC. I want to be comfortable, but I don’t want to have to deal with the thermostat anymore. I also want to save money, but I don’t want the hassle of trying to figure out everyone’s schedules and programming the system for that. Now, these goals are somewhat contradictory. If I wanted to maximize my money savings, I simply turn off the AC. But, that costs me in terms of comfort. If I want to be comfortable I run the system, and I am going to incur operating expense. There’s a balance here somewhere.

So, after a little foray into a Research Experience for Undergrads, where I did some research into intelligent control systems, I’ve decided to start wiring up my house. I have a good thermostat that gives me the ability to control the HVAC via my computer. I can also read information about the temperature in the house.

I also need to keep track of who is home and who isn’t. To do this, I’ve enlisted the help of Google and my cell phone. Every so often, my phone tells Google where it is. I can pull this information straight off the web through a nifty URL Google provides. I currently have my home computer doing this every 10 minutes. I’m going to let it run tonight and all day tomorrow.

I propose to use this mechanism to train an artificial neural network designed to learn my occupancy patterns. This can be used to determine if I’m going to be home at any particular time, giving my HVAC something to work with to determine when it should operate.