Background

In 2008 I began a project to duplicate the technique(s) found in “Nude Descending a Staircase” using Max/MSP and any solo-dance video.

Theory

For theory, you can refer to Edward Fry’s beautiful book Cubism for a “canonical” approach to cubism. There are a dozen copies at the Strand.

Method

My approach to cubist video employs the following techniques:

• the breakdown and rearrangement of objects in space
• the breakdown and rearrangement objects over time
• different perspectives

All of these components can be found in Duchamps and Picasso. Video allows for more complicated implementations of more or less the same ideas.

 

 

This project is quite well advanced, but is being done under the auspices of the Program for Survivors of Torture. When I am finally authorized to publish the work, I will post a link here. Contact me if you are interested in this project.

 

 

My research, conducted with Dr. Kristina Jones of Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, and under the aegis of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, is on the impact of sexual assault on the level of PTSD among male torture survivors.

It was originally presented at American Psychiatric Association in May 2015. An updated version was presented at the 10th Annual Research Symposium of The National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs on March 5, 2018.

The research found that sexual assault is associated with a dramatic increase in the presentation of Post Traumatic Stress disorder among male survivors, ranging from 1.5 times to 2.0 times, depending on how narrow or broad a definition of sexual assault is used.

It is being prepared for publication. If you would like to view it, please feel free to contact me and I will provide you with a password.

Click here to view the DRAFT interactive website I’m developing with Dr. Jones based on this research using Angular and Material Design. The idea behind the project, technologically, is that research, once published, becomes static. We want to create a research project that can be updated in real-time as our evidence base changes.

Click here to view the DRAFT interactive website I’m developing with Dr. Jones based on this research using Angular and Material Design. The idea behind the project, technologically, is that research, once published, becomes static. We want to create a research project that can be updated in real-time as our evidence base changes.

 

 

Go to Course Outline

MMP350 gives students the tools to build standards-compliant dynamic web sites. Students will incorporate client-side and server-side scripting with advanced CSS to create intuitive and interactive web interfaces.

From a technological perspective, the content management system WordPress will be the focus of the course, but other web technologies, development approaches and frameworks will be actively explored. A foundational knowledge of programming concepts, HTML, CSS and design for the web, is required for this course.

Over the course of the semester students, either individually or in small groups, will create a portfolio or blog using WordPress. With the instructor’s permission, the term project may use development frameworks such as Bootstrap and Angular.js and / or content management systems such as Drupal or Ghost. For the design component of the class,students may use image editing programs, for example Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Maya and AfterEffects. These technologies will be supported, as time allows, by the Professor, but are not considered critical pathAdd links to syllabus and course materials

 

 

Introductory Video Course Outline | Syllabus | View Student Projects

I taught this class at Sarah Lawrence College in the fall of 2016. You can see the final student projects by clicking on the View Projects link.

The Human Rights and Technology Innovation Lab considers in what ways “21^st century technologies” like voice recognition, data visualization, smartphone applications, and social networking can (and cannot) be used to improve service provision by human rights organizations, human rights advocates and political actors. The class has two primary components: weekly seminars and a final project. The weekly seminars feature discussion, student presentations and outside lecturers. The final project will be a web-based multi-media research paper and/or digital art project.

The goals of the course will be achieved through three units of 4 weeks each. The first unit will look at ways in which technology can, and cannot, be used to improve the intake process for torture victims specifically, and trauma victims generally. The second unit will ask the same questions, but from a research perspective. The final unit will focus on multi-media publishing.

Academically, the class will feature concurrent streams related to fjve different disciplines: clinical psychology, software application development, data visualization, user experience design and communications. Although students will be exposed to all of these disciplines, they will not be expected to master them all.

 

 

For 3 years, between 2013-2016 I taught the master’s thesis class at the Integrated Digital Media program at NYU-Poly, in which I assisted over 60 students to get their theses, of whom twelve were directly supervised by me. In addition, I assisted Andres Pang in teaching the same class in 2011 and 2012.

I also taught two different capstone classes during this period, the Integrated Digital Media capstone class and a one-off “Digital Story Telling” class, which was the capstone for the Sustainable Urban Environments program in 2014.

One of the most exciting aspects of these classes was the wide range of technologies which I was got to work with, including augmented reality, virtual reality, micro-controllers, motion sensors, interactive multi-media installations, computer vision software and – of course – video and web programming.

Projects which I supervised include:

• Pop-Bike – a Real Time Data Visualization of NY City Transit by Qijing Zhang
• Beijing Memories by Stacey Zhang
• My Taiwan by Pei-Wen Lo
• Li Huang’s Prototype for a Portable Interactive Camera
• Jonathan Tse’s Brainwave Controlled Drum Machine

Students who I have taught but not officially supervised have done some very interesting projects.

 

The Apocalypse Review is at the center of an eco-system of web pages that parody echo-chamber politics. For example, the joke Republicans to Replace Medicaid with Guns will reference a parody of conservative political commentary on SurrealClearPolitics.com, or TheShill.us which in turn will reference a parody of think-tanks at AmericansForPlutocracy.org, which in turn will reference comprised academic research at the UniversityOfMedicineHat.org which will cite the NGO OpacityInternational.org which will then link back to the original joke. Currently, only the ApocalypseReview is live. SurrealClearPolitics.com is next in the pipeline. It has been prototyped but still requires approximately $10,000 worth of work. AmericansForPlutocracy.org is third in the pipeline.

From a technological perspective, the core of the project is two docker scripts which generate site templates automatically, including everything from database creation, to styling, to https certificate generation and rudimentary security controls, all in a matter of minutes.

Tech-wise, I’ve limited myself to four sets of technologies, WordPress, the Google sponsored framework Angular 6/7, the Facebook sponsored framework React, and the Twitter sponsored framework Bootstrap. These  technologies, because they’re encapsulated, can be mixed together. This allows me to do tricks that more conventional publishing houses cannot, for example, the mixing up of Google maps and jQuery maps.

Ultimately, I hope that this technology will allow me to compete which much larger publishing firms, because it is relatively low maintenance, extremely scaleable, and multiple sites can be hosted on one server, allowing for shared resources for sites with relatively low traffic volume.

SO if you are looking to compete with Condé Nast, or want to set up an online community newspaper, please consider asking me to join your team.

 

 

NY13 Meta-Data Collection

One of my more interesting projects was creating a cell-phone based “baseline data collection tool” for cocoa farming research in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The tool allowed users to create points and polygons, which could be mapped, annotated and supplemented with images. The link below is my first pass at re-working the tool using the Google Maps 3 API. My goal with this project is to collect politically important meta data for NY Congressional District 13, where I live, for example development projects, re-zoning proposals and polling stations. Its tons of fun for me so I will be updating it on a very regular basis.

Click here to launch the app

Political Maps

The following link is to a map of US congressional districts

Click here to view Congressional Districts using D3

NY City Precinct Map Using Leaflet

NY City voting precincts using Leaflet

Marriage Equality

This is a visualization I did for a private client interested the legal history of marriage equality in the United States. Click to view the Marriage Equality Map. This example was written in jQuery mobile which is an awkward tool, to say the least.

 

 

This Public Goods Game Project is an on-line version of one of the most common psychological research tools, the public goods game, which is an outgrowth of the seminal work by the economist John Nash. The project has three goals, to conduct (cross-cultural) research on cooperative behavior, to create a teaching tool for classes in experimental design, and to create a fun game that people want to play.

Thus far I have, with my collaborator Julian Wills, conducted 28 experiments, with NYU Psych students and corporate executives. Our experimental model was designed so that the “maximized utility” scenario required general collaboration, and was easily disrupted by selfish behavior (My paper’s working title is “Maximization versus Winning”) Our work’s most interesting result is the two games out of 28 in which the players figured out that collaboration was the winning strategy and then didn’t deviate from this strategy in order to do better than competing players. In most of the games winning was prioritized over maximization.

In addition to furthering my research on winning versus maximization, I would like to create a platform where others could use this tool to conduct their own research.
To achieve this goal I need to be sponsored to create an “experiment creation” interface. The game itself has been repeatedly tested, and is remarkably robust. The message server has been running on a ubuntu server for years without any sort of intervention, for example. All I need to do is create an interface to let users set game parameters, for example, number of players, whether punishment is allowed, whether punishment is weighted etc. The game itself is “paramaterized” so once these options are set the game will record itself. A second addition, is the facility to collect demographic data. Demographic data always has the potential to be more contentious so collecting it is a secondary goal.