1. Research Philosophy
Barrett E. Koster
I love building complex tools and solving hard problems. As luck would have it, I've been in
mostly-teaching positions (typically teaching 8 different courses a year), so I have put a lot of my
research-energy into student projects. To their credit, my students have tackled some pretty
clever things (in a lab with machines we built ourselves with no IT staff). There was a program
to write music, a program to measure a room just from the sound, a program to do the core
function of Auto-Tune -- shift your voice to any pitch and still sound like you -- in 1999!
Recently my students wrote a program to tell if a watermelon is good by thumping it. I have
many ideas for projects that students can help with, and if the student already has an interest,
there's almost always a way to apply the computer to it.
I've also put at least some energy into other areas on my own. Here are my current projects,
which I think have great potential.
Kinks is a finite element simulation of M-dimensional fabric in N-dimensional space. Of
particular interest is 3D fabric in 8D space. The fabric gets tangled up in itself and forms stable
microscopic particles I call 'Kinks' (like knots, only the fabric is still flat, strictly topologically).
This may have implications for String Theory.
Owie. My dissertation program to do automatic lip sync was fine as far as it went, treating
several different categories of sounds separately. I have a plan to knit these together using
Markov models. Modern computer speed and memory can turn what was originally an all-night
crunch into real time, and I suspect compression rates for speech can exceed MP3 by a lot.
Chippy. A while ago a student project was to write a bread board simulator for TTL circuits, and
I've been cleaning it up. I've used it once in Computer Org course to help students understand
chips, and it's close to being ready to publish.
TimeBug. I'm developing a time schedule program that helps the user budget and spend time the
way many programs helps budget and spend money. It helps fills days the way an executive
secretary would, and then it can summarize where you time is really going.
I realize that the record for my research is weak. And I don't want to complain about my current
job. But in a more conducive setting, with more computer culture and potential collaborators, I
expect to get some good work done.