Stewart Crawford

Research Interests and Projects:

My CV has all the gory details and links to recent publications.

Programming Projects in Secondary Science and Mathematics...

A 3-body problem: earth, moon, sun.
Watch for happenings at:
t = 120
t = 820
t = 1160
t = 2200

(restarts at t =2400)

RECENT COOL DEMOS:

Well, at least I think they're cool. If you like them, too, e-mail me...

Thanks for visiting!

I hear babies cry, and watch them grow.
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know.
And I think to myself, "What a wonderful world..."

George David Weiss & Bob Thiele

Machine Learning

Check out my recent Q-learning Demo: Exploitation Agents and Boltzmann Explorers in action (java applet - it may or may not work depending on your platform and JVM).

When defining boundaries in complex imagery, my doctoral research demonstrated the benefits of using machine learning based on expert knowledge, as opposed to making edge assumptions. You can read the full dissertation, or try these:

A few other ML projects grabbed interest and funding during my graduate studies:

Computer Graphics and Animation

Read what some students said of CS-410, the Computer Graphics class I taught at CSU.

My animations these days are predominantly user-driven Flash animations. Starting with the basic QuickTime VR object model, I've extended it in several directions: models are end-over-end rotatable, labeled with highlighted hot spots, and can be run in parallel with cross-fades between them. I've worked with Visible Productions, applying these improvements to biomedical visualizations for the Anatomy & Physiology classroom. (More below...)

I've also explored converting 3D polygonal models to NURBS-based models.

There are so many ways to poorly use digital graphics in print and online. Thus was born Digital Imagery, on the Web and in Print, a two-day seminar I've taught in the corporate arena, to help technical folks use it well in their documentation.

Chia Head, the movie !!! I mentored Kyle, a junior high student, who wanted to do claymation. The full-screen DVD turned out great, but we also generated a QuickTime version for internet viewing (6.2 Mb). After the clay frames were set, Kyle laid down the audio track by improvising on the piano while watching the video track.

Enhancing Education with Flash Visualizations

3D Object VR Models

Flash has a compact & expressive object-oriented scripting language and the widest browser and platform support. At Visible Productions, I took their VR work done with QuickTime, and started with some basic programming (and clever ideas) to move beyond QuickTime's limitations. This lead to taking the Object VR model to new levels of functionality, where models are end-over-end rotatable, labeled with highlighted hot spots, and can be run in parallel with cross-fades between them.

Visible Productions now has libraries of these Flash VR models of human anatomy that are currently being distributed with Anatomy & Physiology texts and on the web site of Merck Medicus.

Flash in the Classroom

For Anthropology, here's a prototype module for comparing, scaling, and contrasting the Bodo and Tabun skulls in 3D. (A 1 Mb download - be patient please, there's no downloading-progress bar on this demo). An earlier demo (13 Mb) contrasts Mrs. Ples (STS5), OH-9, Bodo, and Tabun to modern skulls (drag the cursor over the skull to rotate; use the sliders to vary transparency on the layered skulls.)

To grab student interest in Biology & Human Anatomy, I developed prototypes of gaming-style software for secondary school classes. An initial prototype module for the digestive system helps students, through play, understand the basic anatomy & physiology of digestion. Then the students are exposed to the state-of-the-art Visible Human dataset, where teachers can develop detective exercises in following structures throughout this set of high-resolution sectional imagery. This work was funded through an NSF Phase I SBIR grant.

Here's a graphic of the leg muscles, demonstrating the of labeling structures with highlighting.

For Computer Science, Flash could be a great tool to introduce programming. The ugliness of object creation is handled visually, and the coding has immediate & direct visual results. A handful of lines of code make this color mixer example work (go ahead, drag the circles around). A more intricate expanding menu example illustrates key concepts of design decomposition, timelines, and programming, and it demonstrates the compactness and elegance of programming in Flash. Can you do this in Java or your favorite 4GL? Show me! (Hint: think damped harmonic motion.)

infobahnWeb-site Design & Usability

Web pages should be robust, quick to load, honoring the user's preferences (in OS, monitor size, browser choice, window size, font & color preferences, etc.) as well as visually appealing. If not, users may well go elsewhere before ever making it to the page's content.

Here's some sites I've designed along these principles:

I developed a series of workshops and seminars for the corporate training & education arena, and delivered them to several organizations in the Denver area.

While now somewhat outdated, here's an online reference & tutorial for building simple web pages, using Netscape's free Composer tool. The basic principles of web page objects and properties remain the same, though, with any web page tool.

Software Engineering

I've had ongoing freelance consulting arrangements with various clients in process improvement, defining solid requirements, reliability engineering, operational profile testing, and software QA. In recent years I've been working to update Formal Technical Review (FTR) processes (aka "Software Inspections").

During my career at Bell Labs, I was a part of the team effort to define the project management process company-wide. Earlier in my careerI defined, lead, and supervised independent assessments of R&D software projects, providing improved software development methodologies within AT&T's Bell Labs (this was a parallel effort to the maturity model work of Watts Humphrey at SEI). And early on, I developed and helped to implement a set of corporate QA metrics for software projects within Bell Labs.

Contact information:

Last updated Jan 2009

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Ask first! Stewart Crawford, © 2006.