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.

 

 

I am working with the artist Kate Gundersen to turn some of her amazing cut-out pieces into a coloring book / post-card generation tool. My prototype can be found at: The Current Culture Coloring Book

The project uses the Angular framework.

 

 

As I’ve grown older and stodgier I’ve compiled a list of important ideas that have had a profound impact on my (intellectual) life. This site is a chance for other people to record important bits of knowledge for the next generations. Readers are encouraged to rank the results so that good ideas percolate to the top.

Note that this site is just now being created.

Things I Wish You Knew

This project is a tool for people to record bits of life-wisdom

https://thinkgsiwishyouknew.com

 

 

 

 

For three years I assisted Tahir Hemphill on his Rapalmanac project (2015-2018). This involved the analysis of over 300,000 hip hop songs, using tools such as IBM Watson to assess sentiment and language-level.

The current project can be found at rapalmanac.com

I worked on Tahir Hemphill’s Rap ALmanac Project between 2014-2018, and am currently training my replacement. The project seeks to create a comprehensive collection of all hip hop lyrics, regardless of language; analyze the data; and create an API to access the data and the analyses.

NOTE: The https certificate for the site has expired! I’ll get Brandon (the current site admin) to fix that ASAP!!!!

I imported and analyzed over 300,000 songs using a variety of natural language libraries. Analyses include language level, sentiment, sophistication and rhyme type. Perhaps the most difficult part of the project has been cleaning up the data so that lyrics in dozens of different languages can co-exist harmoniously.

Technologies employed include java, docker, Django/python, javascript, MySQL and php.

Photo of Tupac graffiti by Cat Branchman from Seattle, U$A – 2Pac, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45941417

 

 

Although these credentials are quite old, I include them to demonstrate that I have considerable experience as a public speaker and an expert knowledge of Roberts Rules of Order.

President, University of Toronto Debating Union, University of Toronto

Speaker of the House, U of T Model Parliament, University of Toronto

President, Southern Ontario Model United Nations Assembly, University of Toronto

Speaker, Trinity College Joint Student Union, University of Toronto

Speaker, St. Michael’s College Student Administrative Council, University of Toronto

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