Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA
Past Projects
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HandVu: Vision-based Hand Gesture Recognition and User InterfaceDevelopment on this project is still active.With almost any color camera and sufficient processing power, this software collection implements a hand gesture interface. HandVu detects the hand in a standard posture, then tracks it and recognizes key postures - all in real-time and without the need for camera or user calibration. The output is accessible through a client-server infrastructure in a custom format and as OSC packets. Read more about HandVu or even download the software. |
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Hand gesture input for BattutaProject Battuta is an interdisciplinary research initiative to investigate the potential of emerging technologies and geospatial information resources to bring new functionalities to mobile field data collection. At the UCSB CS department, we research novel user interfaces for wearable computing environments, in particular vision-based hand gesture input. A head-mounted display (HMD) provides a screen for data output, and a head-mounted camera (HMC) allows for data input via hand gestures, performed in front of the body of the HMC's wearer. These two videos give an idea of the focus for our contribution: more current (15MB, Windows Media File), and older (17MB DivX movie). |
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Postural ComfortWhile human factors research gives advice on the range in which humans can operate without experiencing musculoskeletal strain, fatigue or discomfort, no objective measure for "comfort" is known. In this project, we defined a measurable foundation for comfort, which is usually simply defined as the absence of discomfort. Our work suggests that human-computer interfaces should be designed within the limits of a comfort zone. Otherwise, using the interface can prompt the adoption of alternative use patterns, which are often less favorable because they trade off the unnoticeable potential of injury for comfort. We also conducted a user study on the range in which humans prefer to operate their hands when carrying out free-hand gestures. This study also served as an example for how to design studies for comfort evaluation. |
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Pervasive tracking and tracker data fusionA scenario was developed to demonstrate the interplay of various trackers with different characteristics of accuracy, precision, drift, and temporal resolution. A tracker reports the position and/or orientation of a person to facilitate mixed-reality enviroments. A novel algorithm for data fusion integrated the readings from multiple trackers into a single, more precise, and more reliable result. (This was during an intership at HRL.) |
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Navigation and interaction in immersive VEsWe developed and implemented several methods for navigation in and manipulation of a Virtual Environment (VE). The VE was fully immersive with an HMD and included text-to-speech audio. A multimodal user interface allowed natural interaction with voice and gesture commands. Hand and head were tracked with a 6DOF tracker and hand postures (finger joint angles) were observed with a CyberGlove. Hand gestures were then recognized with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) network. Visual output was generated in realtime with fairly low latency by a giant SGI. (This was during an intership at HRL.) |
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The Retroactively Interactive Seminar"Lectures and seminars can yield a much richer and deeper experience for both the speaker and the audience with the aid of readily available technologies"This experimental seminar setup was aimed at proving this hypothesis. By means of online video annotations the audience could augment a lecture with personal remarks and also give the speaker valuable feedback. Questions to the speaker could be asked anonymously and were then referenced by a moderator. The lecture or seminar was distributed via the Digital Classroom and it became interactive with the aid of audience feedback through connected handheld computers. For more information on the organization and the multimedia background, as well as to access stored lectures, please see this publication and the web site for the Retroactively Interactive Seminar (server offline now, sorry). |
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Index structures for service discoverySLPsim is a simulation of a database backend for service discovery systems, defined for example by the Service Location Protocol (SLP). A service discovery system allows services to advertise arbitrary properties in lookup directories. Clients query for a set of properties and get matching services. The goal was to evaluate various index structures that can handle the huge dimensionality of the data set, even for a global SLP zone. Services and queries are read from XML files which can be generated automatically. In the service discovery context we also investigated "attribute-based routing". (This work was with Anurag Acharya.) |
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Java JIT Compiler for Sun MajcThis project asked for re-targeting the Java HotSpot Just-in-time (JIT) compiler to the Sun UltraSPARC MAJC dual-processor single-chip processor. The difficulties laid in a non-existent interpreter and the VLIW-characteristics of the target architecture. The majority of instructions and function calls were successfully translated and partially parallelized. (This was during an intership at Sun Microelectronics.) |
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Surfer's ParadiseSurfer's Paradise was a fun project in 1995 for web-based classifieds (free ads) for surfing and windsurfing gear. It was actually used by many people in Europe until my user account at the ISP expired:-( Simple HTML pages and Perl scripts served content from a text-based database. The focus was on technology exploration, fail-safe text handling, and user friendliness. |
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Miscellaneous Projects and Reports- windows-style extension for emacs shift-mark (now obsolete because the functionality is part of the regular xemacs)- Java JIT compiler for the JDK 1.1.5 JVM, here is the report with benchmarks (speedup of up to 12 times): JIT compiler and the "diff'ed" code - SOAP interface for landmarks for geo-referencing application - porthole: web-page fusion for location-dependent services, using Wrens, - a framework for rapidly evolving network services - detailed performance analysis of media players under WinNT using VTune (report on request) - Java MPI: all-Java implementation of parts of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) - raytracer (n-order reflections, shadows, transparency, refraction), implemented in C++ and later ported to JavaParty - two FFT implementations on SGI Origin 2000: shared memory and MPI - physically realistic "rigid body" particle simulation, parallelized with MPI (report) |