http://wearcam.org/carpe/ last day of classes: previously april 13; this year? Personal Cybernetics and Intelligent Imaging Systems, ECE516 (formerly known as ECE1766)

ECE516 (formerly known as ECE1766)

Personal Cybernetics and Intelligent Imaging Systems

S. Mann

Schedule:

Schedule: 
lectures:  Tues 5pm, and Thursday noon
ECE516H1S   Tue   17:00   WB144    Mann, Steve
ECE516H1S   Thu   12:00   BA1240   Mann, Steve

labs:  Friday 3pm
ECE516H1S   Fri   15:00        Mann, Steve   and    Janzen, Ryan
Final exam schedule is here; excerpt below:
ECE516H1 INTELLIGENT IMAGE PROCESSING X April 23, 2008 2:00 PM
but BE SURE TO CHECK REGULARLY WITH REGISTRAR IN CASE THEY REVISE THE SCHEDULE...

Course "roadmap"

PDF; PostScript (idraw)

Organization of the course follows exactly like the six chapters in the course TEXTBOOK.

location of textbook in university of toronto bookstore

Kevin reported as follows: 
I just stopped by the UofT Bookstore, and to help the rest of the
students, I thought you could announce that the book is located in the
engineering aisle, and exactly to the left of the bookstore computer
terminal behind some Investment Science books.

Resources and info:

Supplemental material:

CyborGLOG of Lectures

CyborGLOG of Labs

Readings:

Christina Mann's fun guide: How to fix things, drill holes, install binding posts, and solder wires to terminals

Let us know if your lab group could use an extra member:

there's a student looking for a group; the student's self-description is:
My background is in Electrical engineering, so more hardware based stuffs. I'm good in designing circuit particularly with Orcad and Altium, I used to be a member of University of Alberta's robotic team and currently a member of University of Toronto submarine robotic team that we prepare ourself for international competition held on San Diego in July. I've got good familiarities with C programming. What I have done till now is writing C for PIC microcontrller and a little for LPC. also for our course, I wrote something for AVR micro controller. BTW, I'm taking my Ph.D in wireless communication at u of T.

Material from last year (2007):

Lab 2007-0: Demonstration of an analog keyboard

Example of analog keyboard; continuous fluidly varying input space:

Lab 2007-1, Chapter 1 of textbook: Humanistic Intelligence

In lab 1 you will demonstrate your understanding of Humanistic Intelligence, either by making a keyer, or by programming an existing keyer, so that you can learn the overall concept.

Choose one of:

Ideally we would have at least one person doing each part of this project so that we can put a group together for the entire result (keyer).

Lab 1 results:

OKI Melody 2870A spec sheet

The OKI Melody 2870A spec sheet is here.

Lab 2007-2, Chapter 2 of textbook: Eyeglass-based display device

In this lab we will build a simple eyeglass-based display device, having a limited number of pixels, in order to understand the concept of eyeglass-based displays and viewfinders.

This display device could function with a wide range of different kinds of wearable computing devices, such as your portable music player.

Link to ECE516 Lab 2, 2007

Lab 2007-3, Chapter 3 of textbook: EyeTap (will also give intro to photocell)

Presentation by James Fung:

Lab 2007-4, Chapter 4 of textbook: Photocell experiment

photocell experiment and a recent publication describing it.

Example of linear regression

Today there were two really cool projects that deserve mention in the ECE516 Hall of Fame:
David's comparametic analysis and CEMENTing of telescope images:

Peng's tone generator:

Lab 2007-5, Chapter 5 of textbook: Lightvectors

Lab 2007-6 and 7

Final projects: something of your choosing, to show what you've learned so far.

No written or otherwise recorded report is required.

However, if you choose to write or record some form of report or other support material, it need not be of a formal nature, but you must, of course, abide by good standards of academic conduct, e.g. any published or submitted material must:

If you choose not to provide a written report, but only to demonstrate (verbal report, etc.), in the lab, you still need to state your source and collaboration material.

It is expected that all sudents will have read and agree to the terms of proper academic conduct. This usually happens and is introduced in first year, but for anyone who happens to have missed it in earlier years, it's here: How Not to Plagiarize. It's written mainly to apply to writing, but the ethical concept is equally applicable to presentations, ideas, and any other representation of work, research, or the like.

Year 2006 info:

Keyer evauation is posted:
Lab 2
EyeTap lab: Explanation of how eyetap works; demonstration of eyetap; demonstration of OPENvidia.
C.E.M.E.N.T. lab
Comparametrics lab: Recover the damage done by the Elipses of Evil, on the Axes of Good:

Tentative exam schedule in previous years

(check the official site by following the hyperlink of the below, to make sure this is the actual time) 

ECE516H1
INTELLIGENT IMAGE PROCESSING
X
April 17, 2006  	9:30 AM
BA-3004

Schedule:

2006 APSC schedule is:
ECE516H1S  LEC 01   Tue  17:00 	18:00 	BA B024   Mann, Steve
ECE516H1S           Thu  12:00 	13:00 	BA 1240   Mann, Steve
ECE516H1S  PRA 01   Fri  15:00 	18:00 	BA 3135 - ECE DigMic LabA

Course summary:

ECE516 is aimed primarily at third and fourth year undergraduates, and first year graduate students. 4th year undergraduates often take this course as their "other technical elective" (fourth year elective). It is often also offered as a Professional Development Course for those in industry who are looking for a new, exciting, and relavant field of study. The classes are comprised of lectures, labs, and tutorials starting in January, along with a final exam in April.

The course provides the student with the fundamental knowledge needed in the rapidly growing field of Personal Intelligent Image Processing (often referred to colloquially as ``Wearable Computing'', ``Personal Technologies'', ``Mobile Multimedia'', etc...). Rather than trying to address all aspects of this rapidly growing field, the course places a particular emphasis on Personal Imaging.

Personal Imaging focuses on what will become the most important aspects of truly personal computation and communication. Very quickly we are witnessing a merging of communications devices (such as portable telephones) with computational devices (personal organizers, personal computers, etc.).

The focus of this course is on the specific and fundamental aspects of visual interfaces that will have greatest relevence and impact, namely the notion of a computationally mediated reality.

A computationally mediated reality is a natural extension of next--generation computing. In particular, we have witnessed a pivotal shift from mainframe computers to the personal/personalizable computers owned and operated by individual end users. We have also witnessed a fundamental change in the nature of computing from large mathematical calculations, to the use of computers primarily as a communications medium. The explosive growth of the Internet, and more recently, the World Wide Web, is a harbinger of what will evolve into a completely computer--mediated world in which all aspects of life, not just cyberspace, will be online and connected by visually based content and visual reality user interfaces.

This transformation in the way we think and communicate will not be the result of so--called ubiquitous computing (microprocessors in everything around us). Instead of the current vision of ``smart floors'', ``smart lightswitches'', ``smart toilets'', in ``smart buildings'' that watch us and respond to our actions, what we will witness is the emergence of ``smart people'' --- intelligence attached to people, not just to buildings.

And this will be done, not by implanting devices into the brain, but, rather, simply by non--invasively ``tapping'' the highest bandwidth ``pipe'' into the brain, namely the eye. This so--called ``eye tap'' forms the basis for devices that are currently built into eyeglasses (prototypes are also being built into contact lenses) to tap into the mind's eye.

Eye Tap technology causes inanimate objects to suddently come to life as nodes on a virtual computer network. For example, while walking past an old building, the building may come to life with hyperlinks on its surface, even though the building is not wired for network connections in any way. These hyperlinks are merely a shared imagined reality that wearers of the Eye Tap technology simultaneously experience. When entering a grocery store, a milk carton may come to life, with a unique message from a spouse, reminding the wearer of the Eye Tap technology to pick up some milk on the way home from work.

Eye Tap technology is not merely about a computer screen inside eyeglasses, but, rather, it's about enabling what is, in effect, a shared telepathic experience connecting multiple individuals together in a collective consciousness.

Eye Tap technology will have many commercial applications, and emerge as one of the most industrially relevant forms of communications technology. The WearTel (TM) phone, for example, uses Eye Tap technology to allow individuals to see each other's point of view. Traditional videoconferencing merely provides a picture of the other person. But most of the time we call people we already know, so it is far more useful for use to exchange points of view. Therefore, the miniature laser light source inside the WearTel eyeglass--based phone scans across the retinas of both parties and swaps the image information, so that each person sees what the other person is looking at. The WearTel phone, in effect, let's someone ``be you'', rather than just ``see you''. By letting others put themselves in your shoes and see the world from your point of view, a very powerful communications medium results.

Of course once the eye is tapped (whether by a handheld device like WearTel (TM), or by Eye Tap eyeglasses or contact lenses), there is the very existential fact that one becomes a camera. In this way, we will be able to have personal documentaries of large portions of our lives, shot from a first--person perspective. Turning the eye itself into a camera will radically change the way pictures are taken, memories are kept, and events are documented. (See for example, the Electronic News Gathering wear project: http://engwear.org)

Text:

Organization of the textbook

The course will follow very closely to the textbook which is organized into these six chapters:
  1. Personal Cybernetics: The first chapter introduces the general ideas of ``Wearable Computing'', personal technologies, etc. See http://wearcam.org/hi.htm.
  2. Personal Imaging: (cameras getting smaller and easier to carry), wearing the camera (the instructor's fully functioning XF86 GNUX wristwatch videoconferencing system, http://wearcam.org/wristcam/); wearing the camera in an "always ready" state
  3. Mediated Reality and the EyeTap Principle.
  4. Comparametric Equations, Photoquantigraphic Imaging, and comparagraphics (see http://wearcam.org/comparam.htm)
  5. Lightspace:
  6. VideoOrbits and algebraic projective geometry (see http://wearcam.org/orbits); Computer Mediated Reality in the real world; Reality Window Manager (RWM).

Other supplemental material

  1. Chording keyer (input device) for wearable/portable computing or personal multimedia environment
  2. fluid user interfaces
  3. previously published paper on fluid user interfaces
  4. University of Ottawa: Cyborg Law course See, also, the University of Ottawa site, and article on legal and philosophical aspects of Intelligent Image Processing
  5. photocell experiment
  6. "Recording 'Lightspace' so shadows and highlights vary with varying viewing illumination", Optics Letters, Vol. 20, Iss. 4, 1995 ("margoloh")
  7. Example from previous year's work: data from final lab, year 2005: lightvectors and lightspace (See readme.txt file).

Lecture, lab, and tutorial schedule

  1. Week1 (Tue. Jan. 4 and Wed. Jan. 5th): Humanistic Intelligence for Intelligent Image Processing
    Humanistic User Interfaces, e.g. "LiqUIface" and other novel inputs that have the human being in the feedback loop of a computational process.
  2. Week2: Personal Imaging; concomitant cover activity and VideoClips; Wristwatch videophone; Telepointer, metaphor-free computing, and Direct User Interfaces.
  3. Week3: Atmel AVR, handout of circuitboards for keyers, etc.; wiring instructions are now on this www site at http://wearcam.org/septambic/
  4. Week4: EyeTap part1; technology that causes the eye itself to function as if it were both a camera and display; collinearity criterion; Calibration of EyeTap systems; Human factors and user studies.
  5. Week5: Eyetap part2; Blurry information displays; Laser Eyetap; Vitrionics (electronics in glass); Vitrionic contact lenses.
  6. Week6: Comparametric Equations part1.
  7. Week7: READING WEEK: NO LECTURE THIS WEEK
  8. Week8: Comparametric Equations part2.
  9. Week9: Comparametric Equations part3. http://eyetap.org/ece1766/.
  10. Week10: Lightspace and anti-homomorphic vectorspaces.
  11. Week11: VideoOrbits, part1; background
  12. PDC intensive course may also be offered around this time;
  13. Week12: VideoOrbits, part2; Reality Window Manager (RWM); Mediated Reality; Augmented Reality in industrial applications; Visual Filters; topics for further research (graduate studies and industrial opportunities).
  14. Week13; review for final exam;
  15. Final Exam: standard time frame usually sometime between around mid April and the end of April.

Course Evaluation:

This course was originally offered as ECE1766; you can see previous version (origins of the course), http://wearcam.org/ece1766.htm for info from previous years.

To see the course outline of other previous years, visit, for example, http://wearcam.org/ece1766_1998.html