Reflective Living

David Birchfield

Assistant Professor - Music, Computation and Digital Media

David Birchfield is a composer, theorist, and computer musician. In much of his work, he utilizes the computer as a compositional, theoretical, and performing tool with a particular interest in musical applications of artificial intelligence and artificial life. He has written instrumental and vocal music for soloists, various chamber ensembles, full orchestra, and a number of collaborative works with modern dance choreographers. In addition to interactive works for live performers and computer, he has created multimedia, network-based, and robotic installations. His works have been presented in concerts and at festivals and conferences across the United States, Europe, Mexico, China, and Australia.

He received a BM in Percussion Performance and Composition from the University of Cincinnati CCM. He received masters and doctoral degrees in Composition from Columbia University. His principal composition teachers include Fred Lerdahl, Tristan Murail, and Brad Garton. David has taught at Columbia University and Adelphi University, and he is currently on the faculty of the Arts, Media and Engineering Program at Arizona State University.

Winslow Burleson

Assistant Professor - Arts, Media and Engineering Program

Winslow Burleson received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab, Affective Computing Group. He joined ASU's Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and the Arts, Media, and Engineering (AME) graduate program in 2006. At MIT he was involved with the Context-Aware Computing Group and the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. He is a National Academies of Science Kavali Fellow and National Science Foundation Panelist. He was a Senior Research Scientist at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and Research Staff Member at IBM's Almaden Research Center where he was awarded nine patents. Awarded a Master of Science degree at Stanford University's Mechanical Engineering Product Design Program, he taught brainstorming, creativity, innovation, and visual thinking within that department. Prior work included curriculum development at the SETI Institute, Co-Principal Investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope's Investigation of Binary Asteroids, and consultant to UNICEF and the World Scout Bureau on Healthy Lifestyles for Youth. He holds a bachelor's degree in Bio-Physics from Rice University.

Aisling Kelliher

Assistant Professor - Media Communications and Media Theory

Aisling Kelliher is Assistant Professor in Media Communication Systems and Media Theory with a joint appointment with the College of Design and the Arts Media and Engineering Program. She received a B.A. in Communications Studies from Dublin City University in 1996 and a MS in Multimedia Systems from Trinity College, Dublin in 1998. She also received a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 2001 and defended her Phd. at the MIT Media Lab in September, 2006. Aisling's work is engaged with revealing the power of the storytelling act as an expressive, reflective and cathartic experience as it is through this communicative process we come to understand ourselves as individual and social beings. As part of this investigation, she develops everyday software applications for creating and sharing rich-media story compositions.

Clark Presson

Professor - Psychology

Clark's research interests include development of spatial knowledge and reasoning, the use of spatial symbols, applications of cognitive development to child and adolescent health psychology, and processes of initiation of cigarette smoking.

Hari Sundaram

Assistant Professor - Arts, Media and Engineering Program

Hari Sundaram is currently an assistant professor at Arizona State University. This is a joint appointment with the department of Computer science and the Arts Media and Engineering Program. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in 2002. He received his MS degree in Electrical Engineering from SUNY Stony Brook 1995 and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1993.

He is principally interested in problems related to multimedia: segmentation, databases, structure discovery and summarization. His current work focuses on the development of computational models for experiential systems. He is also interested in investigating relationships between natural language, vision, audition and comprehension, as well as representational and algorithmic approximations for real-time multimedia content analysis.

He was awarded the best student paper award at the prestigious ACM conference on Multimedia 2002. His PhD thesis was awarded the 2002 Eliahu I. Jury Award for best dissertation. He has received a best paper award on video retrieval, from IEEE Trans. On Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, for the year 1998.

Camilla Jensen

Visiting Research Associate

Camilla Jensen is a Design Researcher with Arts, Media and Engineering. She received a Masters in Industrial Design and Engineering from Aalborg University, in Denmark, (2005) where she collaborated with the LEGO Group and the MIT Media Lab on the next generation of interactive robotic play scenario. This research was presented at the 2007 Interaction Design for Children Conference. She has worked and consulted for several award wining entrepreneurs and design firms. At AME she is continuing this research and working on advancing transdisciplinary mediated systems, and engaged in technology transfer and entrepreneurship activities with the Education Group and the Reflective Living research groups.

Munmun De Choudhury

Research Assistant - Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Munmun De Choudhury is a Ph.D student at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in Arizona State University. She holds a B.Tech degree (2005) in Computer Science & Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India where she had focused on pattern recognition in text and image data. Her desire to analyze human interactions in the physical world, coupled with the tools from traditional computer science has led her to considering 'human communication' as a social media. Therein, her current problems focus on predicting communication flow in a social network as well as detecting the temperture or sentiment of a virtually cohesive community. The key construct that binds her variegated research is 'context sentitivty' in her computational models that involve real human communication. Besides research, Munmun also takes a keen interest in photography, writing, poetry and painting.

Janel Goodman

IGERT Trainee - Psychology PhD

Janel Goodman completed her undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico , where her research addressed memory processes and déjà vu. She is currently a graduate student in the Cognitive Psychology department and in the Reflective Living group of the Arts, Media and Engineering Program. Her present research interests include perception of experiences and interactions as they occur through and are facilitated by media, such as through phenomena like fandom, and cross-culturally.

Eric Keylor

Research Assistant - Media Arts and Sciences PhD

Eric's main passion is classical music. He studied piano, theory, and composition privately at the Cleveland Institute of Music and studied music at Yale, where he graduated cum laude with distinction in the major. At Yale, he was co-music director of the Pierson Camerata, a student chamber orchestra, where he conducted Bach's Cantata 140, Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, Dvorak's String Serenade, and other works. He also spent a semester in the Musikwissenschaft department at the University of Tübingen, Germany. From 1998 to 2004, he was music director of the Canfield Community Band (Canfield, OH) and was active as a church music director and pianist.

Eric also has a Masters of Entertainment Technology from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. During his graduate study, Eric was a programmer for PeaceMaker, which is a turn-based, strategy game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. PeaceMaker won the University of Southern California's Public Diplomacy Games Contest, was a finalist in the Ashoka's Entrepreneuring Peace Contest, and recently won the Best Transformation Game Award at Games for Change 2007.

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Eric was the Assistant Director of the National High School Game Academy, a Carnegie Mellon University Pre-College program held by the Entertainment Technology Center, and he was faculty at Entertainment Technology Center Silicon Valley.

Yu-Ru Lin

Research Assistant and Student Excellence Awardee - Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Yu-Ru Lin is currently a Ph.D student in CSE/AME. Her current research focuses on analysis of weblog (blog) networks, particularly on blog community analysis and spam blogs (splog) detection. Her research interests include social network analysis, information visualization and human-computer interaction.

Swathi Mamadgi

Research Assistant - Computer Science and Engineering MS

Swathi Mamadgi is currently a graduate student pursuing her Masters in the Department of Computer Science at Arizona State University. She is a research assistant under Dr Aisling Kelliher at the Arts, Media and Engineering Program. Her current project focuses on an online Media Repository. Her research \ interests include database and Web application development.

Ryan Spicer

Research Assistant - Media Arts and Sciences PhD

Ryan Spicer comes to Reflective Living by way of academic training in film theory and production and and a strong personal interest in embedded computing, web development and sensing. As a student working towards a Media Arts and Sciences Ph.D, Ryan plans to investigate new and novel processes and computational methods to aid non-experts in creating documentary media recording their own work and experience. Ryan also hopes to work with embedded sensors and output devices in physical computing, both within the field of documentary and outside it.

Rebecca Stern

Research Assistant and IGERT Associate - Media Arts and Sciences PhD

Rebecca holds a BFA in Design & Technology from Parsons the New School for Design. She's a perennial do-it-yourselfer and jane-of-all-trades. At ASU she plans to continue her research in mediated environments, free information sharing and knowledge exchange, and community awareness.

Atit Thekdi

Computer Science and Engineering MS

Atit is currently a Masters student in the Computer Science Department at Arizona State University. He is a Teaching Assistant for an introductory Computer Science course. For his Masters thesis, he is working with Dr. Hari Sundaram on a search algorithm for the Semantic Web. Atit is also interested in Adaptive User Interfaces. Atit holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University. In his life he wants to live simply and happy.

Lisa Tolentino

IGERT Trainee - Media Arts and Sciences PhD

Lisa Tolentino received her BS in Computer Science and MA in Contemporary Music Performance from the University of California, San Diego. During her undergraduate career, she studied aspects of meaning and metaphor with respect to algebraic semiotics with the late Joseph Goguen, Professor of Computer Science. Partway through her studies, she discovered 20th-century "new music," taking an interest in computer music and percussion. Following her bachelors, she then pursued percussion performance with distinguished professor and percussionist, Steven Schick.

Currently, Lisa is working towards a Media Arts and Sciences PhD at ASU. Her primary research revolves around facets of performance studies, including: everyday performance; excellent vs. amateur performers; performance catalysts; and the collection, analysis, and evaluation of captured performance data..

Xiang-Jun Wang

Research Assistant - Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Xiang-Jun Wang is a Ph.D. student in CSE/AME. His research interests include web and multimedia systems and human and computer interaction. His current research focuses on developing event models to support describing and understanding experiences, people, media and their inter-relationships.

Amit Zunjarwad

Research Assistant - Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Amit G. Zunjarwad is currently a M.S. student in Computer Science Engineering at ASU. Having pursued his Bachelors on Information Technology from Govt. College of Engineering, Pune, (University of Pune) India, and worked at Goldman Sachs Co., New York and Tata Consultancy Services, India, he is now focusing on research in contextual correlation among members of social networks as well as multimedia event annotation and content management.

Jisoo Lee

Media Arts and Sciences PhD

Jisoo Lee received a BS and MS in Industrial Design from KAIST, Korea, and performed research on web/multimedia interface and its relation to cognitive and cultural aspects of users, teaching students computer graphics and web design. Her research interests have expanded towards people's communication and collaboration in their work and everyday lives through participation in a project on ubiquitous service at home and classes on digital media and HCI. Ongoing concept research includes the relationship between physical space and cyberspace, functional and emotional needs of human activity, and interaction of human and physical-digital environment.

Rajat Mittal

Computer Science and Engineering MS

Rajat Mittal his Bachelors in Technology (BTech.) in Information and Communication Technology(ICT) from DA-IICT, India. He is interested in enhancing information communication between humans and the digital environment, collaborative information sharing, the semantically aware web and other facets of HCI.

Weiwei Xu

Research Assistant - Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Assegid Kidané

Engineer - Arts, Media and Engineering

Assegid Kidané, 'Ozzie', joined the Institute for Studies n the Arts to maintain the broadcast audio and video equipment suite. As the technology research has grown within the ISA, so has his opportunities to provide a wide range of design and fabrication for the artists/resident artists supported by the ISA.

Some of his recent accomplishments include: design and fabrication of service equipment used for stage lighting control boards, design and fabrication of a wireless data communication device for performers and design and fabrication of laser fence based guidance system for blind performers.

Ozzie continues his creative search to find new ways of expanding the reach and realm of the artist.