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Learn to Play like Minnesota Fats - Augmented Reality in the Pool Hall - Deirdre Dalton

Deirdre Dalton prototyped a pool trainer as her ODCSSS project in summer of 2009 under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The aim of the project was to analyse the game of pool with the view to implementing some simple instructions to help tutor or teach a player.

A camera and sensor were used to take in information from the pool table. The camera was mounted directly above the pool table to capture ball colour and position. A SHIMMER, (Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility, and Experimental Reusability) developed by Intel, was strapped to the base of the cue. Each SHIMMER contains a MicroSD - card slot, a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, a 3-Axis accelerometer (1.5 6G) and a 3-Axis gyroscope (500 o/s). The accelerometer was of particular interest to this project as it was designed to react to very small changes in movement. It relayed the movements of the cue and was used to identify the strength of each shot.

The Shimmer is attached to the cue handle

A shot appeared as a large spike in the accelerometer data. The magnitude of this spike was calculated, and a strong correlation between the distance the ball travelled following this shot and the acceleration was determined. After much experimenting, a general equation was extracted which can determine how far the ball will travel, the moment it is struck by the cue.

This graph shows the correlation between peak-to-trough acceleration and distance that the ball travelled

Using this results it is possible to identify if a player is striking the ball with enough force to travel a certain distance, e.g., to pot a ball or roll up to a cushion for a safety shot. The work presented here is a strong starting point for future experimentation and analysis with a view to fully instrumenting a pool hall and providing teaching aids to a player to improve his/her game.

Further Information

There are more images from ODCSSS 2009 on Flickr. If you are interested in following up on this work or need further information contact Lorcan.

Learn to Play like Minnesota Fats - Augmented Reality in the Pool Hall - Deirdre Dalton

Deirdre Dalton prototyped a pool trainer as her ODCSSS project in summer of 2009 under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The aim of the project was to analyse the game of pool with the view to implementing some simple instructions to help tutor or teach a player.

A camera and sensor were used to take in information from the pool table. The camera was mounted directly above the pool table to capture ball colour and position. A SHIMMER, (Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility, and Experimental Reusability) developed by Intel, was strapped to the base of the cue. Each SHIMMER contains a MicroSD - card slot, a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, a 3-Axis accelerometer (1.5 6G) and a 3-Axis gyroscope (500 o/s). The accelerometer was of particular interest to this project as it was designed to react to very small changes in movement. It relayed the movements of the cue and was used to identify the strength of each shot.

A shot appeared as a large spike in the accelerometer data. The magnitude of this spike was calculated, and a strong correlation between the distance the ball travelled following this shot and the acceleration was determined. After much experimenting, a general equation was extracted which can determine how far the ball will travel, the moment it is struck by the cue.

Using this results it is possible to identify if a player is striking the ball with enough force to travel a certain distance, e.g., to pot a ball or roll up to a cushion for a safety shot. The work presented here is a strong starting point for future experimentation and analysis with a view to fully instrumenting a pool hall and providing teaching aids to a player to improve his/her game.

Further Information
There are more images from ODCSSS 2009 on Flickr. If you are interested in following up on this work or need further information contact Lorcan.

Connecting Families by Sharing the Minutiae of their Lives - Poornima Hanumara

Poornima Hanumara developed the Near Dear project as her ODCSSS project in summer of 2008 under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The original project title was Connecting Families by Sharing the Minutiae of their Lives - it called for an ambient/pervasive/ubiquitous technology for helping family members keep in touch with each other using micro-blogging tools (e.g., using Twitter or Jaiku). Originally we looked at using Nabaztags (thanks Matt), but eventually settled on using Chumbys.

The motivation for Near Dear was that members of a family have different degrees of familiarity and comfort with using technology. While some members of the family do not have access to a computer very often and are not familiar with micro-blogging, for others Internet is the main medium for keeping-in-touch. Near Dear bridges this gap by using Chumby, which sits in an accessible place at home and makes microblogging easy and convenient for computer-novices. We completed a small user study shows that the Near Dear widget is intuitive and serves the purpose of making Twittering more convenient. The Near Dear Chumby widget was released as a beta on the Chumby Network in July 2008 and is available to install on any Chumby. The project is documented on the Near Dear website. The project is being maintained and if anyone wants to collaborate on it going forward we'd love to hear from you :-)

In the News

Before leaving Texas, Pegasus News ran an article on Poornima's success at winning a place in ODCSSS 2008 and wished her luck. During the project, one of the Dublin newspapers, the Herald, wrote an article on Near Dear at an early stage of the project's development when we were playing with Nabaztags. The project was also mentioned in a DCU news release after the mid-term review day, and in science.ie, a popular Irish science website.

Further Information

Pictured below is Poornima being presented with a Hamilton silver coin, her prize for best report in 2008 (the award was presented by one of the heads of ODCSSS, Dr. Aaron Quigley). Poornima's final report was published as a UCD technical report and is available for download here. She still maintains a blog that contains detailed progress of her project. There are more images from ODCSSS 2008 on Flickr . If you are interested in following up on this work or need further information contact Lorcan.

Lost and Found at the Kilkenny Arts Festival 2007

Lost and Found was a collaboration between Science and Art that ran two sell-out shows at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2007. The goal of the project was to engage children in the potential of technology. Lost and Found followed brought its audience and participants on a journey through four magical realms. Sensor technology is used to follow the location and movements of a dancer and map these to the projected visuals and sounds, and through these a story evolves. Active audience participation was required to move the story between the different realms, and children were invited on stage individually and in groups as the show progressed.

The Technology Behind Lost and Found

Lost and found included a diverse set of technologies, including sensor systems based on pressure pads, microprocessor programming to interpret sensor readings from pressure pad sensors, processing to recognise and deal with patterns in behaviour, and flash animation to drive the display.

The Cast

  • Paddy Nixon oversaw the project.
  • Tara Carrigy came up with the vision and produced the show.
  • Megan Kennedy was the dancer/choreographer.
  • Jo Timmons directed Lost and Found.
  • Lorcan Coyle headed the technology team and managed the technology interfaces.
  • Emerson Loureiro worked on the interface and built the technology to react to the dancers' movements.
  • Hui Zhang was responsible for the electronics behind the sensor system.

Press

Reviews of the show appeared in the Irish Times and some of UCD's internal publications. An incomplete list is here:

Case Based Markup Language (CBML)

Introduction to CBML

Hayes et al. (1999) describe imposing a standard case-based view on the information system of an application in order to retrieve case-knowledge. They anticipated that a standard way of representing case based reasoning (CBR) information will make this easier to achieve and proposed a case representation language that would facilitate this. Without such a standard means of representing case data it is up to the application developer to shape the case data from the available knowledge base. The manipulation of case data is dependent on the representation format chosen by the developer. This limits transformation of the data into a format suitable for the presentation layer, or its movement to another back-end component or between distributed CBR components. Hayes et al. proposed a standard case representation language called Case-Based Mark-up Language (CBML) in 1998. Our work in the field of CBR representation is a continuation of that work.

My Chumby

I got a Chumby in June 2008 and here's the virtual view of what channels I'm watching at the moment:

Using RFID to Remember - Colin Smith

Project Summary

The ReFInDer system was a final year project undertaken by Colin Smith under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. The aim of the project was to design and implement a memory aid using RFID technology. This memory aid takes the form a lost and found application. The system records data about user's interactions with everyday objects, such as a wallet or phone, and presents the user with this data through a lost and found website.

Lorcan Coyle - Research

This page contains a summary of my research. I am employed as a research fellow in Lero—the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre in the University of Limerick in Ireland. I currently work with Prof. Mike Hinchey, specialising in the area of Evolving Critical Systems.

I have a few web presences associated with my research, including:

Biography

Dr Lorcan Coyle currently holds a research fellow position in Lero—the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre in the University of Limerick (since March 2009). Prior to that he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Computer Science and Informatics in University College Dublin between April 2005 and March 2009. He was conferred with his PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 2005. He also holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Trinity College (B.A.I. 2001). His research interests include Software Engineering, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, Context-Aware Systems, Machine Learning, Personalisation technologies, and Electronic Voting. Dr Coyle has published at a number of international journals and conferences including the Knowledge Engineering Review, the journal on Knowledge-Based Systems, the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), the ACM Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS), the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), the European Conference on Smart Sensing & Context (EuroSSC), Artificial Intelligence Review, and the International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA).

Dr Coyle served as general co-chair at the 20th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2009); served as volunteers chair at Pervasive 2006; and as Publications Co-Chair at Pervasive in 2007. He is a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence and serves or has served on a number of Internationally peer reviewed symposia and workshops in the area of context-awareness and ubiquitous computing, including the International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness, the International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems, the IEEE International Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence, the International IEEE Workshop on Management of Ubiquitous Communications and Services, the International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context, and the International Workshop on Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation. He has also served as reviewer for The Knowledge Engineering Review, ACM TAAS, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, as well as many of the premier venues for Ubiquitous Computing, including Ubicomp, PerCom, Pervasive, CHI, IUI, and the Internet of Things conference.

Research Projects

Conference and Workshop Organisation

Program Committee Membership

I am/was a member of the following program committees:

I am also a member of the editorial review board of the International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence (IJACI)

Publications

A List of my publications, along with bibtex and links to download is here. My current h-index is 12.

Student Supervision

ODCSSS Students

Since 2007 I have been one of the Project Supervisors on the Online Dublin Computer Science Summer School (ODCSSS). An ODCSSS internship provides a foundation of basic research skills to 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate interns which will aid them in transforming this research experience into a long term plan for final year research or subsequent research career options. There is more information on the OCCSSS website.

Final Year Project Students

In the Computer Science and Informatics in UCD fourth year computer science students are required to undertake a substantial project. The purpose of the project is to introduce the student to a particular field of Computer Science and to give them an opportunity to learn how to undertake a major project, taking it from problem specification through to problem solution. I have supervised the following students' final year projects:

* I was Associate Supervisor to these students.

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