Since begin of this year, I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Designed Intelligence group of the Industrial Design department in Eindhoven. More about this coming soon…

Model-driven Design of Self-observing Products

Before that, from end of 2006 until end of 2010, I did my PhD research at Eindhoven University of Technology in the department of Electrical Engineering, and there in the Electronic Systems group.

This research involves model-driven design and methodology, domain specific languages, models at runtime, and of course remote data collection systems, especially in their connection to human-computer interaction research.

The objective was to enable a novel back-channel from products in the field to the company – a communication channel between the user and the maker of a particular product. This is done however in a flexible approach, called Adaptive Observation accordingly.

Especially in strongly innovative product creation processes, developers are often uncertain about the way their products will be eventually used in the field. If a problem occurs, answers to questions like “Was this function broken from the beginning, or did it stop working after it was used for a longer period already?” (first use vs. extended use) can help to effectively track existing problems. The possibilities surely extend beyond this. Read more here.

In the context of this project, I had the chance to collaborate with great people in both academic (Electrical Engineering, Industrial Design, and Computer Science at TU/e) and industrial settings, to name a few: Philips Consumer Lifestyle + Applied Technologies + Healthcare + Design + InnoHub, Océ R&D, TomTom, Irdeto R&D. Thank you!

Interactive Visual Canon Platform

The interactive visual canon platform is the first project realized in the TU Eindhoven vision studio. In music, a canon is a composition employing one or more repetitions of a melody, played with a certain delay. In visual performance, well, dancing, the first dancer’s movements are repeated by the following dancer with a certain delay. Looks great, yet hard to achieve and practise. Therefore, the interactive visual canon platform as a technical means to let a single dancer invent, practise, and perform a canon dance. More here.

Past research projects

2006 @ Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen

As a student research assistant at RWTH Aachen university, I worked on the ViPER project in the team of Alexander Nyßen:

• ViPER UML2 – Implementation of UML2 structure diagrams

2004-2005 @ ATR, Japan

At ATR, Japan I worked on two projects based on video processing in Michael Lyons’ team:

• SoFA – Sonifier of Facial Actions, face gesture controlled sampler that enables the user to play tones by moving parts of the face which is also visualized in real-time
• FaceBrowser – Java based UI for offline browsing of images gathered from a possibly very long video capture

While being a student research assistant at the Chair of Technical Computer Science, I worked on two projects in Nico Hamacher’s team:

• REVISER – A tool for automatic guideline-based evaluation of interactive systems using an expert system
• TREVIS – A tool for analyzing the usability of interactive systems, e.g. with a formal evaluation using normative user models based on the GOMS theory