Edmond's Space :: Project Expo
Projects that I've worked on @ MIT
MIT taunts the image of a firehose, barraging its students with a dizzying blast
of problem sets and labs. Still, I admit that I love the place, and I've definitely
gotten a strong dose of opportunities to design and engineer real functional systems.
This webpage is an exposition of some projects that I've worked on at MIT.
"MusicDB: A Query by Humming System"
-- [report]
-- October :: December 2005
Ever remember the tune of a song but fail to recall any of its lyrics? MusicDB is
a query by humming music search system that Annie Ding, Calvin On, and I engineered for our
6.830 (Database Systems)
final project that. We represent musical tunes and hums as time series and
use a time warping distance metric for similarity comparisons. A multi-dimensional
index structure is used to prune the search space of songs and efficiently return the
top hits back to an intuitive UI.
Our user experiments on a database of fifty midis are
promising; we find that MusicDB returns the desired song within the top 10 hits with 52%
accuracy and as the top hit with 24% accuracy. Moreover, we believe that substantial room for
improvement in search quality can be achieved with more accurate pitch extraction software and
a more solid midi parsing library than the ones we used. Because few query-by-humming
solutions have been fully documented in the research literature, we document all the core
components of the MusicDB architecture to enable readers to build and extend our system if
desired.
"Enhanced User Authentication Through Keystroke Biometrics"
-- [report]
[presentation]
[code]
-- November :: December 2004
For our 6.857 (Computer and Network Security)
final project, Xia Liu, Chen Xiao, Xiao Yu, and I designed, implemented, and evaluated
four different metrics for keystroke-enhanced user authentication. A keystroke-enhanced
login system increases security by supplementing the username-password paradigm with
authentication of ther user's typing patterns. We explored key press duration, relative
order of key press and key release times, relative keystroke pair speeds, and shift key
usage patterns as potential metrics.
"Vector-based Pong on an Oscilloscope"
-- [report]
[video]
-- April :: May 2004
For my 6.115 (Microcomputer Project Laboratory)
final project, I created a vector-based,
two-player Pong game on an analog oscilloscope. Two potentiometer knobs functioned
as the paddle controllers, and A/D converters translated the voltage set by the
controllers into coordinate information for the players' paddles. The XY mode of
oscilloscope enabled two voltage inputs to direct the cathode-ray tube's electron
gun around the display to generate 2D vector graphics.
Intuitively, from hearing a phrase such as "Cinderella's glass slippers," a child may also
strengthen her confidence to use a related phrase such as "Barbie's plastic slippers."
If we are to understand how human beings acquire and use knowledge about language, we need
to examine the role of statistical regularity in language learning.
As a first step toward tackling this problem for my
6.xxx (Human Intelligence Enterprise) final project,
I proposed the concept of lexical clusters -
collections of words with statistically similar linkage structures with other words -
and implemented a clustering algorithm in Java to explore the role that lexical clusters may
play in language learning. For example, from parsing the phrase "the city mouse and the
country mouse," the algorithm grouped "city" and "country" in the same lexical cluster because
they both modify the word "mouse" in the same manner.
Over January 2004, Alex Crumlin, James Xin Sun, Vincent Yeung, and I teamed up as the
Little Guys
in a grueling robotics competition. Equipped with an onboard Geode CPU,
a web camera controlled by vision-processing algorithms, IR sensors, touch sensors,
a servo-actuated gate and ramp,
and a powerful gripper, our
Grim Gripper
detected and grabbed red balls and green tower in a large playing field
and released the balls into a yellow mousehole. Our robot nabbed us the prestigious MASLab
Engineering Award and a mention in MIT's newspaper,
The Tech.
Gizmoball
-- [report] [jar file]
-- October :: December 2002
In a team along with Chang She, Vincent Yeung, and Min Zhang, we designed, documented, developed,
and tested pinball-like game called
Gizmoball
for our
6.170 (Laboratory in Software Engineering)
final project. Gizmoball has a graphical user interface that allows the user to create
a playing field with variously shapped gizmos, to place balls, to connect actions of flippers
and gizmos to triggers, such as keypresses and gizmo bump events, and to play the ball with
simulated gravity and friction using our physics engine.
"Inside Ed-ition"
-- [site]
-- June :: August 2002
Bumming around at home the summer after my freshman year, I decided to teach myself HTML.
Using Dreamweaver, I assembled "Inside Ed-ition," a personal website where I kept my own
web blog, posted a few photo albums, shared some of my writings, and offered a guestbook.
Crunchtime at MIT stifled any hope of maintaining a blog, and so this site has now entered
into my online archives.
