I've built and worked on a number of systems during my time with the lab. If you have any questions about them, please contact me (email address available here)

I've spent most of my time working on News at Seven, an automatically generated news show. News at Seven began as a project I did as part of the Practicum, a project-based course offered by my advisor Kristian Hammond. The system was originally intended to be a "virtual MC" that could greet and chat with audience members at Chicago's Second City. After we were continually frustrated with the quality of the speech recognition system we were using, we transitioned the system to be a straight news show, and it turned into the lab's first foray into what we call machine-generated content. For more information about News at Seven, please visit its website (http://www.newsatseven.com) or read some of the papers, available in Publications or through the link at the left.

I was also the main researcher on a system called Pivot. Pivot is the product of an idea that has been bouncing around the lab for awhile: If you had a magic wand that you could use to touch items, what kind of information could a system give you about that item? Since magic wands are so hard to come up with, the system was eventually manifested as an iPhone-formatted website into which you could could enter a product's barcode. (We tried hard to do barcode recognition, but the iPhone's camera unfortunately just isn't up to it.) Eventually, we realized that what the system was doing was changing the "pivot point" for online shopping. Instead of going to a major website like Amazon, and then searching, comparing products, and reading reviews, the system turns the physical product itself into the pivot point, and it serves as the center for a constellation of information and services that Pivot automatically delivers you. The actual types of information that Pivot delivers you depends on the kind of item you give it. For books, Pivot gives you things like online prices and reviews, and the names of any of your friends that have the book listed as a favorite on Facebook. For CDs, Pivot gives you a link to buy the album on iTunes and download it right to your phone. For DVDs, Pivot gives you a trailer from YouTube, and a one-touch button to add the movie to your NetFlix queue. Unfortunately, Pivot is no longer being maintained, but you can learn more from a paper I presented at Next-Generation Mobile Applications, Services, and Technology, 2008: Paper (PDF)  Presentation (PDF)

Finally, I also spent some time on Beyond Broadcast. Beyond Broadcast is a system that attaches useful, relevant, and interesting content and services to online video. I built an online system that allows human editors to embody their intuitions about what kinds of content and services would be interesting to their users into rules the system can understand and apply to the videos. For example, a content producer with a lot of cooking videos might build rules that represent concepts like, "Take all the names of any food in the keywords list, and do a Google search for each." or "If there are any celebrity chefs mentioned in the title of the video, find their page on Wikipedia and present that to our viewers." Instead of doing searching and filtering manually for every cooking video they have, the editor can instead build the rules once and Beyond Broadcast will apply them to every cooking video in their repository. This technology is now a part of Beyond Broadcast Media, a company spun out of the lab and licensing the tech from Northwestern.