Welcome to my CDMP Mentorship webpage!
Here you can find information about me, my mentor, and my summer project for 2006.

I am finishing off my third year at the University of British Columbia. I am doing the Computer Science stream of the Cognitive Systems program, and I am also working on a solid base of linguistics knowledge. My earliest graduation date is May 2008.

At the moment, this is going to be my primary webpage, so there is no other personal webpage to link to. My e-mail address is sandray, at cs cat ubc cat ca, where each cat is actually a dot.

Currently I am situated in the MUX lab on the fifth floor of the building's new extension.

Being in the UBC Science Co-op program, I am able to count these sixteen weeks as a co-op term placement. My previous two terms (four months each) were spent in a consecutive eight months as a technical staff "junior sysadmin", also here at the UBC Computer Science department. Therefore, this is actually the third year straight I've been coming into campus. You might say I like it here.

My mentor is Karon MacLean, who I actually met through the UBC CS Tri-Mentoring program. She is a professor at the UBC Computer Science department, and her research focuses on physical user interfaces, haptic and multimodal human-computer interaction.

The Haptic Creature

Formerly HAPTICAT, the haptic creature is a research project investigating the emotional nature of touch. Specifically, the project is interested in mechanisms for communicating emotion through touch, as well as the ways that this form of communication emotionally affects the sender and the recipient. It takes inspiration from the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals, especially pets, concentrating specifically on the haptic nature in which they interact.

To date, an initial physical prototype device was developed to mimic a small set of haptic interactions similar to a cat. This device was employed in a user study investigating its ability to haptically communicate emotions in addition to how this affected the study participants. The results of the study were presented at the 7th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI'05).

Subsequently, a fully mechanized version of the device was built; however, it is still in need of a software system for eventual use. For the summer, I will be working directly under the supervision of Steve Yohanan, one of Karon's graduate students, to assist in the implementation of the software base that is required for the Creature to function.

The Creature currently consists of its physical hardware, including its actuators, which will in the end result, provide the Creature's responses. The sensors are not in place yet; those will take input from whomever is interacting with it (ex. stroking, petting, kicking). The software that needs to be created are the emotional model, the interface between the actuators and the emotional model, the interface between the sensors and the emotional model, and the base framework to tie the software components together.

Project Goals

Since specific details are still in the works, the project has plenty of room to move around, and it is difficult to pin down concrete goals that have to be done. However, for the short term (or possibly for the long term, if it proves to be more complicated than it seems), this is what I will be looking at:

There must be software created in order to visualize and edit the system in real-time operation. This can be considered to be a layer atop of the Creature, allowing us to see in the software what the state of the system is, and also allow us to modify the current state using graphical tools. This will prove to be useful once simulations on the creature are started.

Also, the Creature needs a proper name. My suggestion was "Tickle Me Emo".

Personal Goals

As with any co-op position, what I most would like to get out of a summer placement is experience. So far, the only development experience I have is within the confines of my education, and except for one or two larger term projects, have always been small applications. My goal is to become more familiar with software development, and to learn about the research environment.