Thanks to Jaymes Dec for inviting me to talk at the Marymount School! Here are my notes:

Who I am and what I do… Dustyn Robots
Honeybee Robotics
Making Things Move
SADbot
Robotic hand
Robotic arm

Greg, a former student of mine and current friend/colleague/author/resident researcher at NYU ITP put together this animation within hours of meeting with him to talk about the human movement visualization work needed in the Applied Dynamics & Optimization Lab at NYU-Poly I work in.

Biomechanic Leg Visualization from Greg Borenstein on Vimeo.

It’s just a glimpse of what is to come! This is the kind of thing that happens when you pair up artists and engineers. I fed him some data from Biomechanics and Motor Control of Human Movement by David Winter, and he put this together in OpenFrameworks (and a version in Processing).

Hello world! We are looking to hire one or two students in the lab I work at within NYU-Poly: the Applied Dynamics & Optimization Lab. Ideally this will take the form of project for academic credit – a Master’s project, undergraduate research credits, internship credit, independent study, etc. The credits would officially be for Spring 2012, but we’re looking to hire as soon as possible. So you if you think you have the skills to get the job done, or know someone who does, please get in touch! The position(s) will be at NYU-Poly, but students from other universities with internship credit mechanisms are welcome to apply. We will consider students for each project separately but of course if you think you can cover both of the projects that’s even better.

Battery Monitor project:
By utilizing existing technology and/or developing a small custom circuit, the student will develop a real time battery monitor. The battery monitor will measure the capacity of a battery before, after, and during a load-related task (e.g. while a motor is running for several minutes) to quantify the total energy consumption and the energy consumption rate. The monitor will work with different battery sizes (AA, C, D) and different battery chemistries (alkaline, NiMh, LiPo, etc). The ability to log the relevant data through Processing, MATLAB, LabVIEW, or other tool is essential, and real-time visualization is desired. Knowledge of custom PCB creation – both design in EagleCAD and actual fabrication – is also a plus.

Human Movement Visualization project:
The student will investigate the ability of OpenSim – an open source human movement simulation software – to model custom generated human movement trajectories. Familiarity with C++ and Java is desired but not required. If OpenSim proves to be a useful platform for this research, the student will need to familiarize themselves with all aspects of the software and develop the capability to load custom data and output an appropriate visualization of the movement. In parallel with the OpenSim evaluation, the student will evaluate the use of Processing – another open source visualization tool – in the same way, starting with an existing simplified human model. The goal of the project is to identify and/or partially develop a freely available and easy to use tool to visualize human movement data generated from our lab

I was at a talk at NYU-Poly this evening given by Fred Wilson entitled Why Sector Diversity Matters: Building energy and biotech startups in NYC. I pointed out that unlike the software startups that can be built just about anywhere, biotech and energy startups will often need space and stuff to prototype with. There are several coworking spaces and incubators being set up around NYC, but none that offer desk space and a machine shop, laser cutter, 3D printer, soldering equipment, etc. all in one place to facilitate this type of work. Fred also mentioned someone should make a list of existing spaces, so here it is. This is not the only list out there, but some important ones I know of were missing from other lists, and several lists I found were out of date. I’m sure I don’t know all of them so please leave any omissions in the comments or email me and I’ll add them to the list!

Coworking spaces with some kind of prototyping equipment:
Collab
3rd Ward
Metropolitan Exchange – an interesting building with an interesting story
Tech Shop – coming soon (I was told 2-4 months from today) to Brooklyn!

Other coworking spaces:
green-desk
New Work City
Brooklyn Coworking
Bitmap Creative Labs
Brooklyn Creative League
we work
Green Spaces
in good company
Dogpatch Labs
NYC Office Suites
hive at 55
Like Minds Club
Greenpoint Coworking
SoTechie Spaces
We Create NYC
Sunshine Suites
paragraph
Wix Lounge – this one is free apparently

Incubators:
Brooklyn Army Terminal
NYU-Poly Varick Street
NYU-Poly BEST
NYU-Poly DUMBO
NYC ACRE

Other:
NYC Resistor – it’s really a hackerspace, but they do have an open craft night and a laser cutter
GenSpace – a DIY bio space

My experiences to date with reports, proposals, and conference paper writing leave much to be desired. Generally I'll work on a draft in Word with track changes on, email that to the next person who will accept/reject changes then add more with track changes on, etc. There are at least two problems with this:

1. We are all working serially, instead of in parallel, which takes more time
2. Version control is a mess - files are saved as some mix of date, latest author's initials, vX.X at the end, etc.

I have enough nerd-tacular friends to know a little about Github and software development, especially open source software. Collaborative coding is built in to the process. When will this become the norm for collaborative writing of research papers? What could this look like?

I just submitted my first full length journal article, on which my advisor has graciously listed me as first author! There was about four of us working on it, and we went through the same inefficiencies described here. If you have any experience or suggestions on collaborative writing and editing, please leave a comment or get in touch! Thanks.

In the spirit of Ada Lovelace day (check out the hourly posts at Adafruit Industries), I wanted to take a minute to thank a woman who has influenced my life and career: Dr. Yoky Matsuoka.

I first met Yoky as an undergraduate student in a class she taught at Carnegie Mellon University called Human Systems and Control. I became fascinated with how our body coordinates movement for our more than 200 muscles with such grace and lack of voluntary input. Even recreating a seemingly simple task, like grasping a glass of water, took years of research to recreate in robotics and we’re still working on mastering such tasks. After her course, I was lucky enough to spend a semester doing research in her lab, mostly fabricating small wearable pods for a portable motion tracking system another one of her graduate students was working on. Yoky was one of just two female professors I had during college, and the only one I could “see” myself in. She went to UC Berkeley on a tennis scholarship, was a snowboarder, and had a wine and cheese party at her house near campus during the holidays. As a college athlete, a fellow snowboarder, and budding wine enthusiast, she made me realize for the first time that I didn’t have to choose between my passions. I could play sports and do engineering. I could study biology and robotics. Her work hard play hard attitude and spirit were unique to me among authority figures I had at the time and are both qualities I continue to develop in myself. When I graduated, she gave me and the other undergrads from her lab small parting presents. Mine was a book called The Bad Girl’s Guide to Getting What You Want. Coolest. Professor. Ever.

Since then she has moved on to establish a lab and career at the University of Washington, received a MacArthur genius grant, and become a wife and mother.

I last spoke with her over email on July 26th, when I congratulated her on a recent $18.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish an Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering based at the University of Washington. She will be the director of the program. She responded with just a smiley face and said she was 7.5 months pregnant with their 4th kid! So by now I assume she has an infant to take care of on top of the rest of her responsibilities.

So, Yoky, thank you for being an inspiration to me and I’m sure to countless other young women you have been in touch with. Work hard, play hard, and next time I’m in Mountainview or Seattle or wherever you happen to be, we’ll take your kids snowboarding and talk about robots.

It’s been a long time since I posted here, so I want to quickly share some tips that have helped me this past semester. Before I started my PhD at NYU-Poly in August 2010, I was writing at book while in residence at Eyebeam and doing some engineering consulting work. This meant my laptop went wherever I did. However, once I started at NYU-Poly, I got a shiny new desktop computer. I had to figure out how to take advantage of the new hardware while still keeping in touch with my digital life on my laptop. The point of this post is to share how I’ve figured out an almost free way to work effectively in my new office or at home, desktop or laptop, and have access to everything I need. This has contributed significantly to my quality of life as a graduate student by always letting me get home for dinner and still work late when I need to.

1) Backup
Before I even get into the working remotely thing, I want to stress the importance of automatic backups. Not the kind where you buy an external hard drive and promise yourself you’ll sync up once a week, but the sync-without-thinking kind. I chose Mozy Home from www.mozy.com. It’s free up to 2 GB of backup, then just $5/month for unlimited backup of one computer. That computer is my laptop that lives at home. As long as it’s online, it gets backed up twice a day. I’ve never had a crash situation while using Mozy (knock on wood) so I can’t attest to how easy it is to recover, but the reviews are excellent.

2) Dropbox
Since I was still in the process of editing my book when I started my PhD, I wanted a way to access the files from work if the publisher needed something quickly or had a question. I also read a lot of research papers that I wanted access to at home and on my commute. Enter Dropbox.com. It creates a folder in your My Documents folder called My Dropbox that you can share between multiple machines. Just download Dropbox on both machines and log in with the same account. As an added bonus, you can also download a Dropbox app for iPhone. If there’s a paper I want to read on my commute, I go into my Dropbox app, make it a “favorite” so it downloads to my phone, then I have full access the pdf even underground in the subway. Nerd-tastic.

And, since the My Dropbox folder is on my home laptop computer, the Mozy backup (#1 above) backs up this folder as well. Double nerd-tastic life hack.

You get 2GB with the free account, and if you click here we each get 250MB more free!

3) LogMeIn
This is basically free remote access software. I first heard of it when I worked with a doctor doing clinical gait analysis from multiple office locations who needed to be able to view patient data at different locations. I now have it installed on my home laptop and my work desktop now, and as long as they’re both on and online, I can always control one from the other. I realize this isn’t the most energy efficient solution, so I adjust the power settings on each of my computers accordingly so they don’t do dumb things like keep the monitor on when not in use. This allows me to not only view files that only live on one computer or the other, but use programs that only live on one or the other. This is especially necessary with engineering software that can get expensive quickly.

4) Adobe Acrobat Pro
Speaking of software, this is the only program in this post that isn’t free, open source, or super cheap. But I’ve become addicted for a few reasons:

UPDATE: The newest version of the FREE Adobe Reader allows comments and highlighting!

5) Zotero
Zotero is like an awesome open source version of EndNote or RefWorks. If you’ve never used either, they’re all designed for managing references. Say you want to write an academic journal article, blog post, white paper, report, or anything you’ll need to reference other sources in or keep track of sources for. Zotero can automatically capture citation information so you never have to type it in yourself. It only works with Firefox (an open source browser) and actually lives in your browser. However, once you set up an account, you can download Zotero to Firefox browsers on different computers and it will sync up. In the preferences, you can set it to automatically download a pdf of an article you look up (if available). Then if you click on the pdf in the drop down and go to Show File, it will bring up the default file folder Zotero stores that file in. Then you can reference #4 above and take advantage of Adobe Pro to take notes on the pdf. The file stays linked through Zotero and your notes are preserved, and better yet the whole thing is searchable from within Zotero.

Up too 100MB of storage is free, so I’m not likely to run out any time soon since I just use it for Word/Excel/pdfs, so it’s perfect.
UPDATE: With pdf’s, make sure to attach a stored copy (NOT a link to a stored copy) if your original grab doesn’t automatically download the pdf for you. Links do not sync up between computers – for example, a link to a file I create on my home laptop gives me an error when I try to open it at work. Linked copies are stored locally, but files you actually attach to the citation are stored in the cloud, so accessible from anywhere. #lessonlearned

Shazam! Efficient, backed-up, mobile working. I hope to share more things about my first semester as soon as these pesky PhD qualifying exams are over (January 20th!!).