My masters thesis focuses on how to effectively visualize file permission information. Due to their heirarchical and recursive nature, file permissions can be difficult for a user to reason about. By presenting this information as an interactive visualization, it is easier to develop a mental model of the effective permissions on a file system. Try the prototype here.

I wanted to give presence to the momentum of a digital network. Other transportation systems such trucks, freight trains, and aircraft push their way through the air creating an artificial wind in their wake. A digital network has no equivalent even when it is moving quantities of information which 10 years ago might have easily filled a plane or train. Ambient Fans are an array of digitally controlled tri-speed box fans. Each fan in the array is invididually addressable and can be operated either over a wired or wireless control system. Ambient Fans is similar to Hiroshi Ishii's Pinwheels, but extends the metaphor much further. Ambient Fans utilize visual, audio and tactile sensory channels to convey information to the user. The modular nature of the fans allows them to be used as a linear array, a circular wind-vector representation, or a binary push-pull configuration. Each ambient fan costs approximately $40 to produce from COTS components.

Context-free grammars are widely used in computer science to describe valid input. They are often represented as a set of textual production rules. Tangible Grammars is a system which automatically translates a grammar given as a set of rules into a three dimensional representation. By leveraging innate human perceptual abilities, Tangible Grammars can more easily express characteristics such as grammar connectivity, ambiguity, and infinite recursion. Tangible Grammars is implemented as a javascript tool capable of operating on BNF text input, visualizing the grammar utilizing Three.js, and directly outputting .OBJ files for 3D Printing.

The explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices poses security challenges for which society is ill-prepared. Everyday items are now network enabled and exposed to subversion. Your coffee machine could be used as a cyber-weapon, your thermostat could help sway the outcome of an election. Botnet of Things is a sticker campaign to raise awareness both of those things already connected to the internet as well as those which could be connected in the not too distant future.

Reality based interfaces aim to make digital systems behave according to rules and concepts grounded in our interaction in the real world. We can observe cars on the road, trains on railways, and boats on a river. Why not packets of information on a cable? The visual ethernet cable provides a direct visualization in the context by which the information is carried. The length of the cable displays a fixed amount of network history. A temporal heartbeat in green is animated across the cable to give a measure of time in milliseconds. Outbound traffic is displayed in red, while inbound traffic is blue. Below is an illustration of an ICMP ping and response.

Parellel Coordinates with Standard Deviation is an enhanced parallel coordinates visualization for numerical dimensions. It features a noval adjustable standard deviation bound to allow comparison of mean and variance across multiple numeric dimensions simultaneously.

These two animated visualization were my submission to the MIT Big Data Challenge. They depict taxi trips in the Boston area. Red is used to indicate trips which are headed into the target area, designated by the white circle. Blue indicates trips emenanting from the target. In particular these visualization highlight the role taxis play in transportation to Logan when the T does not run.

For the audience, the moment when a work of art is revealed is one of surprise. For the artist, this surprise often goes missing. Works are actively and delibrately created. My thesis focused on allowing a set of self portraits drawn on a pen tablet to self-organize and self-reinterpret according to rules inferred through machine learning techniques applied to the lines themselves. To maintain the authenticity of the resulting generating drawings they were output on a CalComp E-size Engineering pen plotter for gallery display.

I was curious whether haiku occurred naturally in the wild. To find out, I developed a custom python web crawler with specialized text-processing functionality to examine the syllabic patterns of text in web news articles. Patterns which matched the 5-7-5 form of a haiku would be automatically recorded, along with their source and context. The web crawler was given the website "DrudgeReport" as the starting input, and proceeded to follow links to stories from there. After 24 hours the crawler was halted and the results analyzed. Unintentional haiku were more common than I would have expected. A small selection of the catch is included below. To assess the fitness of the haiku, one was entered into a local newspaper haiku contest under the pseudonym "Jerry Sandler". It won first place in the "To Build a Gasline" category: http://www.anchoragepress.com/news/you-haiku-2008