Boris Smus

I signed up to do one month of paid research at CMU|Portugal before spring classes start. My task boils down to creating interesting visualizations. The bad news is that I have no experience visualizing data and the dataset I’m to visualize hasn’t yet been collected. Fortunately, I’ve always been theoretically interested in data visualization, so I was happy to have a solid excuse to explore the subject. All I needed was a sufficiently rich data set, mad skills and a bit of inspiration. read more…

Last semester at CMU, I was involved in a research project involving Mechanical Turk. The goal was to get Mechanical Turk users (turkers) to collaborate on creating online wikipedia-style articles. Prior to my team’s involvement, an undergraduate created a mediawiki-based platform to allow turkers to collaborate on articles. Despite a high compensation, few turkers completed the task. My team tackled the problem and came up with some interesting videos on the way. read more…

In the midst of my graduate studies, I somehow found the time to write a simple prototype for a mobile Guitar Unleashed client. It’s more of a proof-of-concept for some cool new technologies that I’ve been meaning to play with. Two things led me down this path:

1. Since I’m no longer bound by corporate affiliation, I feel compelled to finally develop an interesting application for iPhone.
2. I’m very bad at remembering guitar chords and lyrics, but never bother making a cheat sheet to take to the campfire. I nearly always have my phone in my pocket, though.

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For the last few days, I’ve had the chance to get my feet wet in the developer sandbox of Google Wave. My first impressions are very positive. I am as awed now by the scope and potential impact of Wave as I was after watching the hour long video from Google I/O.

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One day I wanted to add a feature to Guitar Unleashed which exists in some of the better guitar tab sites. When a user hovers over a chord, they are shown a diagram representing the guitar fret with overlaid finger positions required to produce this chord.

Many of the most popular sites do this by showing  a crude, plain-text representation of the chord. For example, a C chord is shown as follows:

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