Space Vantage Points

When Nadar went up his balloon 150 years ago and took the first aerial photo, he triggered Jules Vernes into writing "Five weeks in a balloon".
The first panoramic view of a natural disaster was taken one hundred years ago after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake using a kite.

The first photo taken from space was obtained in 1946, from a V2 rocket and the first panorama in space was taken two years later.

Fifty years later, thanks to the HASP platform, we took one of the longest panoramic view from a high altitude balloon. This is mainly due to our ability to store large amount of data in common cameras (4GB).
. The interesting aspect of our approach relies on the fact that our low cost camera does not need to be equipped with either a GPS or an Inertial Navigational Unit: The use of a software like Autopano Pro enables us to patch automatically all of our pictures together and create a single large map.

Eye tracking and Autism: part IV

Here is a cheaper implementation of an Eye tracker. The details can be found on a wiki set up by Derrick Parkhurst. We are implementing one of these but have had some problems with cutting the chips out of the board and are about to start some test on it.

The slashdot effect

This Slashdot announcement for the preliminary results on GeoCam generated about 25,000 viewers in the course of two days. While the comment section on Slashdot is not that useful, we received some very helpful tips and ideas on our blog. I have stitched together some of these panaromas with one of the non-free version of the stitching algorithm and I am very impressed. The current panoramas are 25 to 30 MB large.

Panoramic views from 36 kms high

I just used Matthew Brown's AutoStitch program to generate panoramas from our GeoCam flight.

Cognitive Convergence

I am not blogging that much these days for several reasons. First, I am looking into how we can use some of the artificial intelligence techniques we are developing for the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge to diagnose and explore autism. I recently attended a talk by Hideki Kozima who uses of small robots like Keepon to evaluate the socialization of autistic kids. Take a look at the video here. After five to ten sessions with the Keepon, he could show the beginning of a joint attention development in autistic kids. This was very impressive.

I am also involved in the processing of the data we just received from our GeoCam on HASP. We have 4 GB of data to share with the rest of the world. We are developing a strategy on how to do this efficiently.

We are considering a run for the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge with Pegasus Bridge 1. Only this time, the mechanical aspect of the project will take a back seat to other technologies we are developing. We are interested in driver's gaze recording and supervised learning of road driving behavior. But more on this later...

Close enough

The issue of designing a collaborative task manager needs to also take into account real data from previous experiments where collaborative behavior took place. One of the issue is the sizing of the application. Soon into our experiment (in 2002), we jokingly came up with the DC law that stated that the size of the conversation threads between collaborating parties was 1/1000 th the size of the documents attached to these conversation threads. As of today, four years later, the size of the "library" of documents is 22.17 GB. The size of the conversation threads is 18.66 MB. Close enough. This is somewhat amazing that the "law" still holds. Indeed, in a matter of four years, new formats have appeared in the archives: MPEGs or very large JPEGs, yet the scaling still holds.

Tex-MEMS VIII or Tex-MEMS 2006 website is up and running

Following on a previous entry, the website for Tex-MEMS VIII or Tex-MEMS 2006 is now open at: http://texmems.utdallas.edu. One of the keynote speaker will be Amit Lal, DARPA Program Manager.

GeoCam: An Off-The-Shelf Imager for High Altitude Balloons

The blog for the GeoCam Imager is up and can be found here. Here is the most recent photo of it in its casing.



The whole reason as to why we think this off-the-shelf camera is a good idea is explained here.

Fabricating elements around current high end consumer digital cameras (like the clicker) is the most effective way of utilizing advances in digital camera development. We intend on showing how we did all this on sites like Hackaday. Thank you to the HASP program at LSU for giving us a seat in the High Altitude Student Platform (HASP).

Designing a Collaborative Task Manager

I mentionned before the fact that multitaskers could not be more efficient than single minded people because there was a cognitive cost associated with having to upload their memory of the previous tasks. In a remarkable study, Gloria Mark goes farther and notes:

What we found is that the average amount of time that people spent on any single event before being interrupted or before switching was about three minutes. Actually, three minutes and five seconds, on average. That does not include formal meetings, because we figured if they were in a formal meeting, they were prisoners at the meeting, right? They couldn't leave or switch activities. So we didn't count that. Then we looked at [use of] devices, working on a PC, the desk phone, using any kind of paper document, using a cell phone. We found the average amount of time that people spent working on a device before switching was 2 minutes and 11 seconds.

But we called it a "working sphere" because "project" has a limited connotation, and a working sphere is a broader idea. Anything where there's a common goal, there's a certain group of people involved with it, there are certain resources attached to it, it has its own time framework and its own deadline, is a working sphere

So even when we took out what we call "non-significant" interruptions, we find that people still worked 12 minutes and 18 seconds in a working sphere before switching.

But there are also internal interruptions; for whatever reason, people interrupt themselves of their own volition and switch to something else. And what fascinates me is that people interrupted themselves almost as much as they were interrupted by external sources. They interrupted themselves about 44% of the time. The rest of the interruptions were from external sources.

GMJ: How long does it take to get back to work after an interruption?

Mark: There's good news and bad news. To have a uniform comparison, we looked at all work that was interrupted and resumed on the same day. The good news is that most interrupted work was resumed on the same day -- 81.9 percent -- and it was resumed, on average, in 23 minutes and 15 seconds, which I guess is not so long.

But the bad news is, when you're interrupted, you don't immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task. Also, interruptions change the physical environment. For example, someone has asked you for information and you have opened new windows on your desktop, or people have given you papers that are now arranged on your desk. So often the physical layout of your environment has changed, and it's harder to reconstruct where you were. So there's a cognitive cost to an interruption.

The designers of a task manager for a small business could learn a lot from these results. For instance, in my case, the application we developed at my workplace was aimed at handling the communication load of about 60 people with many different schedules, projects and from different functional groups. After some time, we noticed certain behaviors. First, we found out that if the application was not used by everybody uniformly, sooner rather than later, an assymetry of the information stream helped people who were least likely to contribute/use the system. In effect, cooperation between users was less effective over time. The second finding was a little more subtle. The application was written in PHP but did not use AJAX. Every time the page would load with new information, it took the new page about 10 seconds to refresh. In light of the study by Mark, it seems that this is enough of a burden that this cost of "waiting" for the refresh would have people drift into other applications and other "working spheres". For participants, the time spent in updating knowledge in the application felt like "feeding the beast" as opposed to being part of a normal cognitive process.

Tex-MEMS VIII (or Tex-MEMS 2006) will take place in Dallas

It looks like a fire that occured in San Antonio is precluding the organizers to have tex-mems VIII in San Antonio this year. The folks at UT Dallas have decided to organize it instead. The web site will be up shortly.