current projects
- truedat (Assertion-Based Social Network)
A social networking website with a twist; instead of filling out your own profile, the network fills it out for you. Based on the concept that your friends know you better than you know yourself (and are probably more comfortable talking about you than you are), it allows everyone, yourself included, to write assertions regarding your character. These assertions are atomic-level statements that could range from "I have blue eyes" to "Jimmy is the smartest, laziest sombitch I've ever met" to "Sarah has the unique ability to play the panflute and fart in key simultaneously". The community can then rate these assertions based on their level of truth as well as their level of interestingness. Relationships between people are weighted, and these weights change as the system discovers how well people know each other.
The original inspiration for this idea was something very much like the list of facts I have on this webpage, and is probably best documented by me in a submission to HalfBakery.com.
- Online Artistic
Thought Organizer (OATO)
A service that allows artists (musicians, visual artists, etc.) to display their artistic thought processes on a website by making topical and chronological connections between various pieces. It recognizes that artistic works aren't created as a vacuum—they're often inspired by or related to previous works by the artist—and allows the artist to draw these connections concretely, so that the artist him/herself as well as the artist's audience can better understand his/her thought process.
completed projects
- Eclipse-Based Object Bench (E-BOB)
Professor Gary Pollice was interested in sponsoring an MQP involving porting the Object Bench functionality over from BlueJ to Eclipse. BlueJ is an IDE aimed at teaching Java to students new to computer science. The user edits classes using a UML-like editor, and java code is created in the background. The user can also create instances of objects and place them in an "object bench", and manipulate them in a visual way.
While BlueJ is a decent IDE for beginners, it's not designed to be used by professional software engineers. Gary wanted to port the useful functionality of the object bench over to Eclipse, which has an extensive plug-in architecture and is the IDE of choice for a significant number of software engineers. My project partner and I ended up developing a very capable version of the object bench in Eclipse that was seamlessly integrated with the rest of the environment.
- The Gompei Equation (downloads coming soon)
In 2002, the WPI Game Development Club wanted to build a Myst-like game set on the WPI campus. I proposed using Flash as a development medium, due to its ease of interaction and rich scriptability, as well as most likely being pre-installed in most client machines. We first worked on a pilot prototype to float by the WPI administration. We had a script and some pictures, and I wrote the necessary code in Flash that made it into a playable game.
After completing the demo and getting some feedback, I assumed the responsibility of Lead Programmer on the project when a few other people came on board. The final product would have a more involved storyline as well as a richer user experience. I sought out to write an API that would allow others to drop in scenes and add to the game without having to know Flash.
The final product ended up being distributed to freshmen at the activities fair. It helped to publicize the GDC as well as help orient freshmen at WPI.
- WPI GDC Club Management System (CMS)
I originally joined the WPI Game Development Club to try and improve my skills in languages like C and C++, but I ended up being the club's first webmaster and writing a website using Java and XML, built on top of Apache's Cocoon project. I was in charge of both a front-end team (handling graphics, site organization, and site content) and a back-end team (handling content storage, Java coding, and HTML markup).
