The Legacy Awards honor faculty and students whose lives and work embody the spirit of Mayor Allen. 2013 winners were announced at the Founder’s Day Awards Celebratory Program March 13. The awards are supported through the generosity of Col. Stephen and Mrs. Pamela Hall.

I will get to use this money to partially fund my research trip to panama over the summer!

http://www.iac.gatech.edu/news-and-events/annual-founders-day/legacy-award-winners

My instructable for our DWIG project, Paint Pulse, just won the Instructables Design Challenge Grand Prize. This prize comes with a new EOS M camera, Macbook, and our very own LASER CUTTER!

http://www.instructables.com/contest/design2012/

The Discovery Channel’s segment, “Daily Planet” recently featured one of the project’s I worked on for DWIG, Paint Pulse. Check out the video (and see some weird guy telling you to get DIGIT@l)!

BoingBoing discovered a funny video I created last semester when experimenting with my Magnetic Ant Paint: http://boingboing.net/2013/01/30/why-put-magnetic-paint-on-ants.html

In Panama with my jungle partner, Peter Marting, I created a short documentary about the strange, symbiotic relationship between Cecropia trees and Azteca ants.

The weapons of the digital academic are:

• A bookscanner
• Scantailor (opensource software)
• Calibre (opensource software)
• A hacked nook
• Determination for searchable, comment-able digital information

The program in which I am pursuing my PhD is quite loosely structured, allowing for an unparalleled amount of freedom. We do have a few basic requirements, such as creating your own reading list, getting it approved by a collection of academic scholars of your own selection, reading through all the books, and taking oral and written day-long examinations concerning the topics.  How one student determines to complete this task, however, is typically up to him or her.

My goal with this requirement is to freely share all the work I put into curating my list as well as the information and my notes that I compile over the next semester of intense reading. By the time I have finished my test, I hope to have a small, browse-able database containing all the books I went through. My aim with this transparency is to help future students access the information they are seeking and provide an example for how they can efficiently process large volumes of information.

The best method to do this, is to act like a true Digital Media major, and digitize everything I read. Unfortunately, most books are still only available as physical copies. On top of this, many of the books I have already found for my reading list are rare, younger than 1920, and not even available through Google Books. Thus I decided to cobbled together some designs created by the wonderful people at diybookscanner.org, and make my own non-destructive rapid bookscanning machine.

Overall it cost me about $350 including cameras, but it has already more than repaid this amount  in scanned library books, and also functions as a free public service for students and faculty in my department!

Related Links

For one of our main projects in the Digital World and Image Group, we created an artifact for digital / physical electromagnetic water painting. Inspired by the ancient Turkish marbling technique, Ebru (“Cloud Painting”), and the Japanese technique suminagashi, we developed digital tools, such as an electromagnetic stylus, rake to manipulate the design of floating magnetic paints.

Related Links

In Fall 2012 I was able to join Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design to participate in their interdisciplinary course. The experimental class brings together biologists, engineers and physical scientists who seek to facilitate research and education for innovative products and techniques based on biologically-inspired design solutions. The participants of CBID believe that science and technology are increasingly hitting the limits of approaches based on traditional disciplines, and Biology may serve as an untapped resource for design methodology, with concept-testing having occurred over millions of years of evolution.

Projects

• Pascobots – Desert Ant navigation and maple seed dispersion inspires a system design for rapid environmental surveying
  • Report PDF
  • Presentation
• Fresh Kicks – Bio-Inspired design
  • Report PDF
  • Poster
• Several bio-provocative ”found objects”

Related Links

As a first prototype for part of our Aquarium Project, David Stolarsky is heading up a program where we calculate principle components of some arbitrary training data (Tucker’s semaphore poses), and the computers attempts at reconstructing the original scene from the new data (me wiggling) are mapped to C’s E’s and G’s to sonify a Chord in Pure Data.