Andrew Quitmeyer

Legacy Award

Apr 152013

I recently received the Ivan Allen College Legacy Award. 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

Paint Pulse Wins Instructables Grand Prize

Feb 282013

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/

Discovery Channel features “Paint Pulse”

Feb 282013

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 features Magnetic Ant Painting

Jan 302013

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

Paint Pulse: Documentation Video

Jan 242013

Ant Plants

Dec 282012

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

Digital Reading List

Dec 282012

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 [...more]

Paint Pulse

Dec 282012

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.

Bio-Inspired Design

Dec 282012

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 [...more]

Puppeting Principal Components

Dec 012012

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.

Ascent

Oct 282012

To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center at Georgia Tech, several large-scale interactive artworks will be presented, including Ascent. Ascent is meant to evoke the spectacle of World’s Fairs’ hot-air balloon flights, as well as reflect the dynamic nature of current innovative research in the GVU Center, all with a spirit of fun and adventure. A cluster of weather balloons tethered above the Technology Square Research Building (TSRB) is outfitted with a bundle of video cameras moving up and down the balloon line, capturing a 360-degree video panorama of Midtown Atlanta. The video panorama of the city is displayed inside a single elevator in TSRB.

LocalFlux Interview

Sep 162012

Joshua from Localflux interviewed me about my work: http://localflux.net/PostView.aspx?id=135

Ants Secret Code – Reveal

Sep 042012

Earlier, I posted a video of leafcutter ants claiming that it contained a secret code. Well it’s true! Here’s how to crack the code, and how I encoded my messages in the first place. Deciphering The astute observer may take note that the ants carrying leaves only travel in one direction (towards the nest). In fact, this is the entire underpinning to the code. When I presented the puzzle to my lab, the response I got that was closest to correct was from Prof. Tucker Balch who stated that the first thing he would do is “chart the number of leaf carriers visible in each frame over time and look [...more]

Leafcutter Ants Secret Code

Sep 042012

The video below contains a secret message: I’ll reveal the secret and how to figure it out on Tuesday, so you’ll have all of Labor day weekend to ponder. First one to email me with the correct answer gets a prize (don’t email the whole list- serve and ruin the fun!). First one to email me with how to arrive at the correct answer gets mild applause ——————————- Hint 1: To work with the video, it may be easier to download it all at once. Just pop the link into http://www.savevid.com/ Hint 2: (don’t use the hint unless you have to!): This video is slightly easier to decipher:

Magnetic Insect Testing

Aug 172012

Not sure if people have been doing this for dozens of years in the insect world already (maybe this is common practice?), but I just ran some successful tests on an idea I had that I think could lead to some fun experiments. I was reading the fantastic book, The Ants, and they were discussing how one of the interesting characteristics of working with superorganisms is that you can non-destructively turn them into mutants. Regular organisms tend to permanently change when you drastically alter them. You cannot do a quick test with an ape to see how it behaves differently if you remove its liver, or chop off its arm, [...more]

Join Bio-Tracking Discussion Forum

Aug 132012

Subscribe to the bio-tracking.org discussion list Email: Visit this group

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Andrew Quitmeyer

2013