The system I am imagining, nicknamed "MoveGen", would be an interactive movement generator. This would allow a user to create a virtual character, which would take some sort of input (e.g. motion capture data, sound) and respond in a semi-autonomous way. I would personally like to incorporate this into dance performance, but I believe it could be used for other applications, as well. I imagined creating a game that acts like Peter Pan's shadow, where a projected figure would imitate the participant's movement, but then decide to tease the user and run away.

I already have a few seriously interested parties (and potential sources of funding/support), including the UM3D Lab, the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, and the Hands-On Museum.

I am looking for collaborators, particularly individuals with strong programming skills, who have an interest in the intersection of technology and the arts. I expect to encounter challenges with 3D animation and movement physics, computer vision, gesture recognition, dance improvisation, computational creativity and artificial intelligence, so experience or interest in those areas would be beneficial.

The scope of this project would be from present, at least through April 2009. I hope to conduct research and design (remotely) over the rest of this summer, and then start development by the fall.

Please contact me if you (or anyone you know) might be interested!

Aidan Feldman
4th-year, dual-degree Computer Science and Dance
email: afeld@umich.edu
cell: 708-296-3000

and to the GROCS 07 Eat This Michigan! team for coverage of their project in the current edition of LSA Magazine (see the article "The Reluctant Farmer".

featuring

GROCS 2008:
Casepedia * Noteworks * Ouroboros * Talking Points

The Moving Image 2008
Animated shorts from David Chung's students

Limited Fork Theory
New work from Thylias Moss' students

Character Design & 3D Modeling and Animation
2D prints with their rapid prototype counterparts; and 3D animations from Elona Van Gent's students

4:00 - 6:00 Open House in DL1
6:00 Gather in the parking lot behind the Walgreen Center to carpool
6:30 - 8:30ish Dinner at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti's Depot Town
Location: 720 Norris St., 48198. It's on the Corner of Forest and Norris Map

Tables are reserved for us in the Beer Garden - yup, outside, weather permitting! Dinner will be catered - it's tasty Syrian fare from Exotic Cuisine!

Here's a video of the setup. We linked the six machines up into a gigantic network. That is to say, the network on each machine actually hooks up to its neighbors networks via an ethernet hub. This represents about a 700 node network.

Bluestream Keywords: Noteworks Demo Setup

I (John) also showed off my Michigan-shaped composition. Definitely the worst-sounding composition, by far, but we got the best video of that one. Probably because I wasn't the one taping.

Bluestream Keywords: Noteworks Michigan-shaped

We're waiting for some other video to show the other presentations. When it becomes available, we'll post it here.

Thank you to all those who attended!!

Bluestream keywords: Bedtime Music

Here's Rob's description:

Put this on for a while as you're tuning out for the night (the motor is @ the bottom). As you can hear I was very much inspired by John's work, but this has an open fifth as the central theme. The general movement is upwards and to the left... and then meandering back down.

Rob makes really good use of stochastic vertices - particularly in conjunction with feedback loops. Sometimes the loop feeds back into itself, and sometimes it feeds into a [set of] sink rest vertex [vertices]. I had some of these same structures in my last (much less interesting) composition; it's interesting to see the patterns/tropes that emerge from the fundamental node types. Same with the motor, as Rob has characterized them - the two rests pointing towards each other. They drive the rest of the piece.

The echo nodes (i.e. the blue nodes with the letter E inside them) are something new this time. The idea is that an echo expresses in the same way that the calling node (or the caller's caller, and so on if applicable) expresses. The interesting part, however, is that these echo nodes can effect a change on those input nodes - for example, transposing the input key, or increasing/decreasing the volume or duration. Rob uses this to really interesting effect to construct a simple subnetwork that kind of generates [recursive] thematic motifs.

Patrick was pretty excited when he saw Rob's work this evening. He IMed me:

I have been listening to [Rob's composition] for like 20 minutes.... [I]t has been super different the whole time i have been listening to it.... [I]t is like someone is performing for me.

This notion fascinated me. In a sense, we are not creating compositions with this software; we are abstracting one level higher, where we're designing a composition embedded with its performer, in that we're specifying constraints on how a performer (read: stochasticity) can interact with the network. In fact, I hesitate to call these creations compositions, because they're more than that; perhaps I should start calling them, in earnest, Noteworks. Anyway, it's like we've successfully broken down an artificial barrier between performance and composition. Or something close to this.

The fact that Patrick could listen to a network that was ostensibly so simple - and yet derive enjoyment out of it for twenty minutes and more - tells me that we're really on to something pretty incredible here. I mean, a lot of the credit has to go to Rob's talent as a composer, for sure. But all of us have been incredibly surprised and pleased at our success in designing a tool in which the "core mechanic" is to define the composition as a set of relationships between sounds.

Also: we finally have the Internet nodes implemented - though they were not present in the above notework. Internet nodes allow you to connect noteworks over the Internet - effectively expanding your notework across machines and constructing a far more sophisticated soundscape.

Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5
6 - 8 pm
Video Studio, Duderstadt Center
North Campus, University of Michigan

Experience surveillance and suspicion in an interactive airport environment.

An interactive performance funded by the GROCS grant exploring issues of privacy and surveillance in a simulated airport.

This is a performance unlike any you've ever experienced, where the line between actor and audience doesn't exist, fiction becomes fact and your flight may in fact be delayed.

Spread the word - the more people who fly, the better the experience for everyone.

And make sure to see Noteworks' demo starting from 5 pm both nights!

User Functions:
* Add and edit (non-collaborative) – FRIDAY finished case is static WYSIWYG, WANT FOR FRIDAY live-blogged case is a blog page
* Publish and update case studies (non-collaborative; templates)
* Comment on cases (anonymous or identified, forum format)
* Report as inappropriate (subject identifiable)
* Classify cases (use pre-defined classification, e.g. MeSH)
* Tag cases (folksonomy, recommend existing tags in case)
* Automatically suggest tags based on content
* Predictively suggest tags from taxonomy while tagging
* Page Templates
* Export pages (PDF, HTML, etc.)
* Find similarly tagged cases
* Attach in line video and audio to cases
* Rate comments
* Rate cases
* Rate users (? indirect from comments/cases) – compile reputation score from case contribution rating quality, page views, amount of discourse
* Search for cases (faceted and/or free-text)
* Edit/update user profile

System Functions:
* Authenticate users
* Maintain user profiles (identities)
* Maintain user roles

Wish List
* Maintain user reputations (# and/or ranking of cases or comments?)
* Authorize users to publish cases (credentialing physicians)
* Present custom UIs based on roles
* Verify consent or de-identification of cases

physician
medical blog
medicine
doctor

Any other suggestions for good blog tags are welcome!

An aside: Casepedia also presented a poster at the School of Information's Expo and received wonderful feedback. Stay tuned for a design review March 28.

Are you interested in being involved in a theater piece like no other? Minimal lines, minimal costumes, minimal rehearsals and maximum impact? Enjoy your Flight is looking for you! We are a GROCS funded project presenting an interactive theater piece dealing with issues of privacy and surveillance in a simulated airport setting.

The roles have various levels of commitment and require little to no memorization. The idea is to react at a certain time to a certain stimulation, whether that be an action, a speech, or a noise. Roles range from the more visible (a provacateur, Patriot Act Supporter) to more standardized (Security Guard, EMT) to the minor (Victim, Messenger).

Performances are at 7 pm on Friday and Saturday April 4-5 in the Video Studio in the Duderstadt Center on North Campus.

For those with more intensive roles, there will be a brief discussion/rehearsal on Friday, March 28th at 6 pm. Dinner will be provided :).

If interested, please contact Katy Ralko at kralko@umich.edu.

Check out our blog to see more details.

AMIA Poster Submission
We will be submitting a poster for the American Medical Informatics Association Conference in November 8, 2008 in Washington DC. Rupa and Maureen have been working industriously on the abstract this week. It will show the results of our competitive analysis and primary interview results.

First Talk Presentation
Rupa and Maureen presented for the UM School of Information's Featured Information Research Student Talk (FIRST). They presented on our initial results, the evolution of Casepedia, and future directions.

Prototype Presentation (and usability testing?)
We are aiming to complete a prototype by the end of the wrap-up. The prototype will be functional for users to add cases into it. Once the prototype is built we will eventually move towards usability testing to evaluate the software.

Process and Experimentation
Casepedia has experienced some pretty radical changes since its inception. Our results from our semi-structured interviews with key informants have changed the way we conceptualized the content and user populations of Casepedia. We are now targetting Chief Medical Residents' Morning Reports as our primary contributors and practicing physicians in isolated or rural ares, who are far from tertiary or academic medical centers like UMHS, as our primary user population. Medical Residents and participating UM departments will use the site as a repository for their Morning Rounds materials. The content of morning rounds includes a description of a case that is used to demonstrate topic points and case management. Chief Residents already are creating Chief Sheets which are documents that outline the case they are discussing that day. Therefore, they already are putting in time into the case, so it will not be too much extra time to complete the case online.

Enjoy Your Flight : Encounter Surveillance and Suspicion in an Interactive Airport Experience

Duderstadt Ceter Video Studio
Gallery opening at 6 pm with Noteworks
Performance following the reception at 7 pm

We're working hard with the DMC staff and Noteworks to coordinate all of the details (and all the projectors we need!).

All seems to be progressing well, we're knocking task after task off of our to-do list. Check out our poster image in Bluestream!

Have a happy and safe weekend!

First we defined what our "Wrap" is going to be. We hope to deliver a research paper, a prototype of a Talking-Points mobile device and a working internet database to create and edit location information. Read more ...

Then we will be presenting our project at the School of Information's expoSItion on Monday between 12:00 and 2:00pm. Read more ...

And finally we started developing our client software last week and wrote a blog post about how the client architecture is going to look like. Read more ...

Noteworks will need 6 “kiosks” set around the Central Collaboration Area. Each kiosk will contain a small table, a Windows OS computer with speakers, keyboard, and a mouse, a projection screen and a projector with rear-projection capabilities. The user at each kiosk will face away from the center of the room as they interact with the Noteworks program. The idea is to have the projection on the screen mirror what is on the computer screen, but have the actual computer screen out of view. The projectors will also be out of view if we can hook them all up with rear-projection. The user will interact using a mouse placed on a small table in front of the screen. The final piece that we need is a switch with 6 ports and 6 Ethernet cables, so we can network the computers together.

Breakdown of equipment:
6x small tables
6x windows OS computers
6x stereo speakers
6x mice
6x keyboards
6x projector screens
6x projectors with rear-projection capabilities
1x switch with 6 ports
6x Ethernet cables

The permanent record, or “wrap”, for Noteworks will include the piece of work that we present to the event attendees. This could also include a piece that audience participants produce each night of the demonstration. We will also include a manual, which will be a set of instructions on how to use the program, and what capabilities the program has. In addition, we can describe the process of creating the program from conception to application, including hurdles we faced as programmers, musicians, designers, and a team.