Thought I'd update this site with a couple things I've been working on!

Most lately I've worked on Pyro, the environmentally-unfriendly anti-social game where you burn down trees and feel great! Our team won the title of best visual presentation at the Occupy Notman Hackathon this past weekend. Check out the game via the link above, it was my first time playing with HTML5 and I had a lot of fun. Disclaimer: I don't think burning down forests is a good idea, but it's pretty fun to do in virtual reality.



In the fall semester of 2011, I collaborated with the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill on a very interesting project. I worked on the groundwork of enabling a motorized wheelchair to navigate autonomously through crowds of pedestrians, using a Kinect sensor. The project I worked on owes a lot to Peter Henry of the Robotics and State Estimation lab at the University of Washington. My research report is available for viewing here.



Finally, shout out to Matthew Huebert with whom I am working on a fun project which involves playing with the brains of famous people, and exploring aspects of computational linguistics. Matthew is involved with organizing Hacking Health, a Hackathon aiming to improve the healthcare system by getting hackers, designers and other smart people connected with healthcare professionals. I'll be there, how about you?

De retour

Hello Montreal, sorry for our time away, but I think our relationship has the room to grow stronger now that we've spent some time apart.

Yes I'm back in Montreal and it feels good. New digs, new courses, new opportunities.

I'm back in Montreal and planning to be studying at McGill for 3 more semesters. This semester is the semester of the robots:



Let me explain. In addition to taking the intro course on robotics, I have got myself involved in a research project about a robotic wheelchair. My task: find a way for the wheelchair to navigate autonomously through crowds of pedestrians. I love problem solving, and this is an interesting challenge if I've ever seen one.

My internship at Microsoft was successful. It was surreal being there on the inside, and I had some great conversations with people on the inside that I will never forget. Maybe I'll be back next year...

In any case there are a lot of things to tackle back here including the Tech Think Tank's first Demo Day and guest speaker event next Thursday. Now if only McGill workers would stop being on strike so we could book a room.

Ciao 4 now frenz!

Jon

So I was just making this blog post a second ago when I accidentally deleted it all, irretrievably. Sucks, right?? Here's the long and short of it:

Been interning at MS for like 2 and a half weeks now, feeling pretty comfy. I've only really been homesick one night, which was kinda weird cause I felt homesick for 3+ places at once. I miss all of yall! This is what happens when you move around..

All kinds of characters out here. Chill bros, stuck up nerds, fast-tracking money-seekers, the HR ladies, tomorrow's visionaries, all that. Mostly people fall into the chill category though, although the MS community is pretty insular, unsurprisingly. MS campus in Redmond is huge, and all the intern welcoming peeps try to get us to relate to it in terms of a college campus, makes sense I guess. The recruiting crowd is pretty funny, they try really hard to be cool and make it seem like they care about interns.

The job itself is aight, though I don't really know all what I'm doing. I don't code at all, I just write up silly stories with these poor characters who haven't had their software needs met, until our magical product comes in and cures their pathetic souls. haha I like the way the last sentence turned out.. Anyways, this process is called writing a spec document. Ya there's also more to it but this is the beginning, the root, the seed. Next step is talking to developers and getting them to tell me how all my ideas are infeasible.

Gonna stop here for now, let me leave with the following words of wisdom:

BRAINWASHING TOTALLY WORKS, DUDE!

Yours truly

Me, Nick, Udit and Marc bullishly presenting our vision of the future.

The #skhackathon, co-organized by Startupifier and the Tech Think Tank was a wonderful success. I wound up working with a team developing an online marketplace for trading school notes, called Notetrade. We created a whole functional website in less than a day using the Django framework. Five other teams presented their awesome ideas as well, and you can see them all online, courtesy of Technophilic magazine, who documented the event.

Since I'm a fan of node.js, a hilite for me was the presentation by the team behind node-rocket, a rapid development framework that further blurs the client-server distinction. It was awesome talking to the hackers and entrepreneurs present for the occasion.

The Notetrade team is currently moving forward with plans to continue working on the site, since we were all impressed with our reults from the hackathon. The site's not live yet, but expect some updates in the future.

keep hackin