Research
Adaptive graphic design systems that leverage human creativity (MS Thesis Project)
investigates a distributed architecture to facilitate automatic
adaptation of graphical representation in digital documents to constraints
imposed by the presentation device. The goal of the system is to select
the most effective graphical solution from among a set of such solutions
given the characteristics of the viewing environment (i.e. resolution,
screen area, aspect ratio, color depth) or to determine that all available
solutions lie below a specified effectiveness threshold in order to prompt
manual, human redesign for that particular case.
Proposal (submitted 12/2005)
OPENSTUDIO
is an online marketplace of digital art created by the Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab. The software combines free creative tools, flexible network infrastructure, and an open web services API to create a powerful community-based economic system in which participants create, buy and sell artwork. The OPENSTUDIO project is an evolving synthesis of creativity, community, and capitalism.
SMPL Rendering Services
is a networked service for converting and transforming various graphical formats to common raster images to permit the documents to be displayed in any environment without having to depend directly on the rendering libraries. For example, an application on a cell-phone may need to display all or part of a PDF document despite not having access to such a library. The Rendering Service can provide the needed support by rendering the PDF to a standard image and returning that to the cell-phone application for display. Other, more advanced, modes of operation are also supported including compositing of multiple documents into a single image. The service, which is primarily written in Java, uses SMPL to communicate with other services on the network and relies on native bindings to Apples Quartz graphics system when needed. The Rendering Service currently produces all the images of artwork featured on OPENSTUDIO.
SMPL
is a network architecture and software framework for developing collaboration-oriented, distributed applications over the Internet. It provides a means of constructing networked services around various classes of computing resources and the mechanisms for assembling and composing those resources into distributed applications. SMPL is primarily the work of Carlos Rocha and was the subject of this MS Thesis in 2005. I helped out with the initial design and implementation and then authored several of the core services in the framework, including services for authentication, storage and user information.
Treehouse Studio
is a predecessor to OPENSTUDIO. Treehouse was a research project aimed at introducing children and adults to the ideas of digital arts and design. It was mostly a collection of creative tools, many of which communicated with a central server for support services. In late 2005, the project was renamed to OPENSTUDIO following a major overhaul of the infrastructure. There is an ongoing effort to transition many of the treehouse applications to the updated OPENSTUDIO system.
