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
Volunteer/Guest Lecturer, NYU Ability Program, fall 2014. I was a guest lecturer (4 lectures in total) in Allan Goldstein’s class on digital narrative. My role was to apply the lectures from my Digital Storytelling class, taught in Spring 2014, to a class in which sociology and engineering students illustrate/visualize a story related to the goals, struggles and/or achievements of people with cerebral palsy.
Toronto Environmental Alliance, graphic design, 1990
Board Member, Donna Uchizono Dance Company 2004 – 2007
Pollution Probe, research and data management 1986 – 1990
The Associated Blind, 1991
Time Magazine Canada, “The New Nomads”, Cover story on the migration of Canadian technologists to America, June 28, 1999
Debater on the Public Broadcasting Service, representing Canada in a Canada-US College debate on capital punishment, 1986
Debater, The Great Debate, TV Ontario, fall 1979
August 2012 Anatomically Incorrect Festival, New York. I presented Flappescope, a dance piece created in Max/MSP which uses kaleidescopes, mirror images and an absolute difference shader. http://vimeo.com/46832207
August 2011 Mind-full Festival, New York. I presented a series of data visualizations based on noise algorithms, saw tooth waves and Voronoi tessellations. Several of these can be found on the video tab at brianmacmillan.ca, although the true impact of the videos cannot be seen, because the bitrates and resolution of the pieces are higher than can currently be viewed (practically) on the internet.
June 2011 Lucky 7 Festival, New York. I presented some of my cubist dance video experiments.
May 2011 Up in Arms Festival, New York. I presented some of my cubist dance video experiments.
April 2011 Euphoric Femme, Toronto. Artistic consultant on an installation piece that used blue tooth, Wii remotes and Max/MSP to create an interactive, multi-user sound and art piece. I worked with the artist Teresa Ascencao.
Feb. 2011 What Next Festival, Hamilton, Ontario. Premiered the video commission Rain Coming with the Hamilton Philharmonic. To view, please go to http://vimeo.com/24231550. Please note that the bit rate and resolution of the piece presents poorly via the internet.
June 2009 Necropolis Festival, New York. Presented a photographic exhibit of still images from videos created using absolute difference shaders, for example Glass Dance, http://vimeo.com/4727807.
May 2008 Tibetan Book of the Dead, New York. Presented an interactive video and motion- sensing installation.
Dec. 2007 V Brooklyn Video Festival, Brooklyn NY, December 2007. Presented a project which used Max/MSP to illustrate an object database of Brooklyn.
2004 Wai Café, NY. Presented portrait photography and 9/11 photographs.
I was hired by the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies to produce 20 research reports on all areas of research at Ontario’s Universities. This project had a profound impact on the scope of my knowledge.
The Flow Through Hypothesis, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Computer Science, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Computer Science, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Electrical Engineering, OCGS, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Economics, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Business and Management, OCGS, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Geology, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Mathematics, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on English, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1990
Discipline Report on Comparative Literature, OCGS, Toronto: 1989
Discipline Report on English, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1989
Discipline Report on Modern Languages, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1989
Discipline Report on History, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1989
Discipline Report on Sociology, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1989
Discipline Report on Psychology, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1989
Discipline Report on Physical Education, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1989
Discipline Report on Medicine, Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1988
Discipline Report on Non-Medical Health Sciences, OCGS, Toronto: 1988
Discipline Report on Education , Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, Toronto: 1988
In addition to the specific research projects listed below, I am actively working on what I call “real-time” research papers. The traditional means of publishing data involves discrete samples in static texts. My intention is to rethink this process in light of 21st Century technologies, specifically to create research projects that can be updated in real-time on web pages, including statistical analyses and the visualization of results. I am using the D3 javascript library, the statistical analysis package num-py and the web framework angular.js in this project.
Incidence of War Trauma in Survivors of Torture who have been Sexually Assaulted
I am working with Dr. Kristina Jones from Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, under the aegis of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, on research related to the incidence and intensity of post-traumatic stress disorder in torture survivors. Our work was presented at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference in spring 2015 and at the 10th Annual Research Symposium of the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs (sponsored by the State Department), on March 5, 2018. It is being prepared for immediate publication.
NGO Roots of the World Wide Web. The traditional narrative about the formation of the World Wide Web focuses on the enhancement of a university-based US military research network by HTML enabled graphical browsers and commercial email, in the early 1990s. While this narrative explains the spread of the Internet within American, British and Canadian academia, it does not explain the spread of the Internet to much of the rest of the world. This essay looks at the considerable technological impact that the 1992 Rio UN Conference on Climate Change had on the spread of Internet technologies to developing nations (particularly Brazil), focusing specifically on the work of NGOs like Web Networks, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), and the Tides Foundation.
Public Goods Game Between 2015 and 2017 I worked with Julian Wills at New York University Department of Psychology on research related to selfishness and altruism. I have written a web-based game that employs a node.js and the jQuery mobile responsive design library. The goal of this tool is to examine factors influencing group-oriented and selfish behavior. One of our most interesting experiments measured the impact of testosterone levels on game outcomes, conducted at the Neuro Leadership Conference in November 2016. Provisional results suggests a correlation between testosterone levels and selfish behavior, but are not conclusive. My collaborator in this project, Julian Wills, has been recruited by Facebook, in part because of this research. This project is in abeyance pending additional funding.
Techniques for the Creation of Cubist Dance Video. This essay, the documentation of my digital media Master’s thesis project at NYU, is a playbook of tools that videographers/editors can use to create cubist video. I focus on the use of buffering and frame subtraction to simultaneously create multiple perspectives on an event, and to compress sequences of actions into one image.
Negation: The Concept of Negative in Art, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy and Science. This paper analyzes the concept of “negative” from a multidisciplinary (visual art/language philosophy) perspective.
Rethinking Heidegger’s Phenomenological Web. This essay uses a pun on Heidegger’s famous notion of the phenomenological web as a starting point for a discussion about how virtual and trans-human technologies are fundamentally altering the nature of human reality.
In addition to these specific projects, I have a passionate interest in epistemology, particularly as it relates statistical analysis. My current area of reflection is the relationship between deductive and inductive inference, particularly as they relate to the issues of evidence, proof and meaning.
Databases Oracle, Sybase SQL Server, MS SQL Server, MS SQL server, DB2, MS Access, Foxpro, dBase. I have also assisted students with Postgres and MongoDB.
Mapping Arc GIS and Google Maps
ETL Informatica
Content Management Systems Documentum, Sharepoint, WordPress
Operating Systems Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS, OS/400
Trading Platforms, BART/Tram, Clearvision, CLS
Programming Languages: SQL, Javascript, Java, Pascal, CGI, PHP, Lua, Processing, Python, Visual Basic and C#. I have managed projects which used C++ and Open Frameworks.
Frameworks and Web Libraries: Struts, Bootstrap, Angular, jQuery, jQuery UI. As a teacher I have helped students debug many others.
Web servers: Weblogic, Apache, Websphere, IIE
Communication Protocols/Messaging Technologies MQ, Tibco, XML, FXML, OSC, ODBC, JDBC, Socket I/O
Graphics Applications Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design, After Effects, Corel Paint, Corel Draw, Quark Express, Flash, Max / MSP, GIMP, Pure Data
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Consultant, Program for Survivors of Torture, 2013 – present. I manage PSOT’s data collection, analysis and research.
Instructor, The Daily Kos, Jan. – March 2019. This course involved a series of classes related to the management of a three-tiered web architecture, with a particular focus on the IBM Watson application programming interface, and the use of modern javascript techniques including promises and node JS.
Lecturer BMCC, spring and fall 2017 I taught MMP350, an advanced programming class featuring Bootstrap, php, WordPress, and web design concepts. The entire course can be viewed at MMP350 Home Page.
This was a temporary position in which I covered for a full-time Professor who had been assigned to a course development project. Over the course of the year I completely redesigned the course materials so that the class could be entirely taught online.
Guest Lecturer, Sarah Lawrence College Fall 2015. At Sarah Lawrence I taught the Innovation Lab, an inter-disciplinary class that focused on the application of technology to human rights issues. The goal of the class was to expose non-technical students to a range of new media technologies. Student projects that I closely supervised/mentored include an animation for an animal rescue shelter, a social media campaign about sexual assault, a web-based psychology research project, several interactive maps and visualizations using the D3 and ThreeJS video libraries. The class website is here: Innovation Lab Home Page . Student course work can be found here: Innovation Lab Summary of Student Projects
Adjunct Professor, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, Integrated Digital Media Program, 2013 – 2015. At IDM I taught the master’s Thesis class; the capstone class for undergraduate studies for students in Sustainable Urban Environments program; the undergraduate capstone class in Integrated Digital Media; and the Graduate Colloquium class.
You can find out more about the class content at: https://brianmacmillan.com/content/teaching
Thesis advisor, Polytechnic Institute / Tandon School of Engineering at the New York University Integrated Digital Media Program, 2012 – 2016. I have supervised 12 master’s thesis projects, including work on the visualization and auralization of brainwave readings using the MUSE portable EEG; visualization of transit and demographic information using Google maps and the D3 data visualization library; an animation of a student’s memories of traditional Beijing; and a game designed to teach Chinese ideograms to native English speakers; a haptic control for a miniature camera; and an animation/promotional video for Taiwanese tourism. In addition, I assisted over 50 master’s students with projects related to augmented reality, virtual reality, video production, animation and game design.