Doug Fritz | Pile of Data

Go Dining Philosophers

2011-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

Wrote a toy implementation of the dining philosophers problem to teach myself concurrency in go.

Awesome OSX Developer Setup Guide

2010-02-25T00:00:00-08:00

Speed a lot of time setting up various tool chains and libraries and getting systems up and running. Putting together a guide to keep best practices (IMHO) on setting up a dev box in os x.

Ouroboros Ascii

2010-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

Mug Design for the new MIT Media Lab building. Code in the shape of one building to output ascii art in the shape of the other and vice versa.

EyeFlect: Gaze Estimation

2009-12-02T00:00:00-08:00

Controlling the high speed flashing and reading of multiple infrared LED/phototransistors pairs we create a structure for lightweight camera-less gaze estimation in a mobile form factor. We show that it is possible to do gaze estimation of the human eye using only four leds and phototransistors, by a trick in the sequence and processing of flashing. Thus enabling cheap, and effective gaze estimation for a variety of HCI applications.

Military Industrial Googleplex

2009-11-04T00:00:00-08:00

The trickling down of technology from tech startups to everyday citizens.

ThemeStream

2009-10-31T00:00:00-07:00

Shows live streams of information at different scales and with different views that animate smoothly between each other. Topic modeling and semantic parsing of the text are used to display trends over time of your information. The interface provides a means of reflection on information streams at different conceptual levels of detail.

Multi-Flash Edge Detection

2009-10-29T00:00:00-07:00

Experimenting using multi-flash techniques to do edge sensing.

Dynamic Focusing

2009-10-20T00:00:00-07:00

Dynamically adjusting the focus of an image by mixing images taken at different angles.

Wisdom, Intelligence, and HCI

2009-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

Something that I have often longed for is to fully understand the difference between wisdom and intelligence; what I mean is that if intelligence is a function of the rate at which we synthesize and can apply new experiences, and wisdom is the integration of that function over time, then research in understanding the synthesis of intelligence (how we integrate concepts and apply new experiences) is probably the most beneficial method for gleaning wisdom as a society.

SpaceMarks

2009-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

SpaceMarks is a tool for spatially organizing bookmarks and emails. It incorporates a consistent zoomable space for organizing your personal information. One can intuitively group and cluster and move items, and then also bind meta data or tags to the spatially organized objects.

Color Mixing

2009-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

This week I have been experimenting with color mixing of different channels.

Flip a Coin

2009-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

The process of making a decision to make you happier can make you less happy. So how do you win in this seemingly, lose-lose scenario?

Simplicity Complex

2009-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

Simplicity Complex is a rule based art work, created by visualizing all 3 word combinations containing "mit media lab". For example the phrase "simplicity meditates claustrophobically": "si(m)pl(i)ci(t)y (medi)t(a)tes c(la)ustropho(b)ically", contains the phrase within the phrase.

Data Portraiture

2009-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

The art world uses the tradition of portraiture to semantically compress relevant information about their subjects into a single art work. We believe this tradition can be extended into the digital realm by the use of topic modeling to compress individuals’ information into generative data portraits. Data portraiture has strong implications for navigating large social spaces, collaborative systems, and self reflection. We briefly showcase our works thus far to highlight potential directions in this emerging field.

JotWatch

2009-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

JotWatch is a device designed with the singular purpose of easing quick note taking on the go. Today’s busy lifestyle demands that we juggle a variety of tasks dynamically. Note-taking has been a crucial aspect of this, allowing us to extend our working memory on demand. However, the ease-of-use and speed of physical systems has proven robust against the advances of digital technology.

Lying to Learn

2009-03-29T00:00:00-07:00

Here we have designed anonlinechatgame whose main purpose is to collect common‐sense knowledge by meansstructuredlying. Its focus, is on on the often‐ignored realm of half‐truths and associations latent in a good lie. We posit that learning the truth may be improved by understanding the good lies that surround it. Learning these different connective ways of thinking may proveto be a particularly powerful avenue to explore for developing better common‐sense knowledge‐bases.

ConnectUs

2008-10-31T00:00:00-07:00

In this project lifestream information (bookmarks and emails) are aggregated and used to generate user interests, which in turn are combined to generate ambient maps of connectivity projected on the ceiling of a social space. The idea was to act as a compass for social navigation, giving subtle hints of related topics and connectivity of interests between people in the room.

Delicious Clusters

2008-02-28T00:00:00-08:00

Clustering Interface for delicious data.

Morning Shower

2007-04-01T00:00:00-07:00

Photograph of each individual water droplet I used during my morning shower, taken with a high-speed camera. Every drop of water was photographed, cropped, and individually printed (Roughly 1,682,425 droplets photographed). Final print is 3 feet by 50 feet! You obviously see only a small subset of the droplets in the cropped photo above.