Studying papers in the field of human-computer interaction, specifically those that focus on how to advance wellbeing through technology. Reading papers exploring the interaction between machines and emotions, and about studies to augment wellbeing through wearables. For example, studies of note include how technology has helped people with special needs communicate and regulate emotion better. I am interested in how computers can be used improve the human experience.
I worked on translating a text of medieval German for a semester, because I had just taken a year-long course on German and was interested in its linguistic history. I translated a portion of the Song of Louis.
I chose this text because unlike most medieval texts, the Song of Louis is able to be dated exactly in the 9th century, around the early 880s. This is because the 59 rhyming couplets praises the Frankish King Ludwig III’s victory over the Vikings in August 881 in the north of France’s Saucort, according to Wright. The poem is also noted to have features of the Preislied genre, since it is a panegyric emphasizing deeds of a hero, common in the oral traditions of that time in Germany.
The purpose of the projects were to be trained in research skills through studying various open and solved problems in computational geometry. I explored the tools to research such problems through being trained in tools like Mathematica and learning how to review literature.
For one semester, we explored the folding geometry of Platonic solids and of oil droplets through a collaboration with a physics lab. For another semester, we explored ribbonization phenomena through studying the paper titled Cartan Ribbonization of Surfaces and a Topological Inspection. My project was to understand how the scholars achieved ribbonization of a torus with the correct cut-off width functions. I investigated the geometry of the Cartan planar ribbons used to construct a torus and managed to replicate its results empirically for the lab.
This project was inspired by civic art projects. It was eventually launched as gallery+ TXT with 10 items at the Yale Art Gallery in Spring 2016. gallery+ TXT was prototyped as “BlueFruit” at Unhackathon 2015 with John Tambunting, Cameron Yick, Victor Zhen, and Mohammad Islam. Twilio Devangelist Rob Spectre helped us with the Twilio boilerplate and mentorship!
We wanted to explore how communicating directly with art could affect people’s experiences in the museum. gallery+ TXT was an app built using the Python Flask Framework, Google Spreadsheets, and the Twilio API. I learnt how to prototype apps, work with JSON-encoded data and Twilio integration for the first time through involvement in this project. Data from the first opening is here.