BeagleToGo

Technological advances have resulted in going to the field armed with a GPS, digital camera, sensors, along with paper maps and field notes, only to come back to the lab and try to sort it all out. ButterflyNet is a tool that uses time stamps to rapidly collate and allow searching of field data in a spatial and temporal context. It allows one to more quickly distill patterns which may be hidden to the scientist when files are stored separately.

See the publication for more details.

Broader Impacts: Increasingly our information in day-to-day lives is trapped in multiple software, data file types and formats, from cell phone messages, email, word documents, etc. ButterflyNet is an example of merging different digital datastreams so that they can be interactivtly searched and examined together to speed utility of all these data.

EcoPod provides the advantages of different paper-based tools to identify species, with a seamless interface for users with different levels of expertise, and the value-added more images, ability to report observations, provide auditing information, and other features

Watch the video (starring and directed by the amazing Andreas Paepcke for a quick overview!

See the publications for more details.

We were very excited when one of our publications won the Vannevar Bush Best Student Paper at the ACM / IEEE-CS Conference.

Broader Impacts: Tremendous expertise is required to identify diseases, and is currently a limiting factor in the treatment of disease in rural areas that lack such expertise. Designing technology to train people with a range of technical backgrounds would help a much greater number of people be able to  help catch and treat a breadth of human diseases.

TeamTag was designed by Merrie Ringel Morris to label images quickly with lots of metadata. When running a test of a prototype that Merrie created with my metadata, I labeled 500+ of images with over 100 pieces of metadata in an hour. Brilliant!!!

The data (image filename and the attributes) are output in an Excel matrix which can be easily imported into different software to manage images.

See the peer-reviewed publication for details.

Broader Impacts: The ability to tag images with metadata is a rapidly growing field. Examining alternative strategies that incorporate human ease-of-use will better allow users to manage the increasing size of digital images, making the images more accessable and uable.

In order to measure the length of fur on a butterfly to understand heat balance, I devised a method for high resolution measurements. To the right the method is in action using a dissecting microscope to measure fur on a preserved museum specimen. 

Broader Impacts: Understanding how existing low-tech can be used to increase resolution, is necessary in the growing field of creating tools for new technology users in impoverished areas.

To examine bleaching of coralline algae, I designed a camera contraption to be able to take color-controlled images in the intertidal in at several sites.

Broader Impacts: Increasing information throughput and ability to access the information later is essential to increasing the quality and efficiency of data streams. With millions of cameras in the hands of users, creating camera technology that allows for control of varying environmental parameters (e.g., lighting and its impact on color of objects) would increase the quality and the utility of data being collected and the ability to gain information from the images later. Future iterations would incorporate other technology to compensate for other perturbations such as acoustics. In addition existing technology would be integrated to allow 3-D spatial pinpointing of information critical for multiple people accessing and working with the same physical objects.