Nerd Girls

Do you think that brains are beautiful? Geek is chic? Smart is sexy? Then run, don't walk, over to the Nerd Girls website now! With these beliefs in mind, the Nerd Girls mission is to "encourage other girls to change their world through Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, while embracing their feminine power." Now you can join the movement, too!

The Nerd Girls website just launched today, and there was supposed to be a segment about it on the Today Show (I'll hopefully find it online later, since I don't have cable). If you look around, you might find something interesting on the blog section of the site.

Did you see it?

Yup, one of the bloggers is yours truly! I'll be posting one or two stories like those you find here every week. I'll also point you to those stories from this blog so you'll always know when they show up.

While you're there, you may as well also sign up for the forums, where you'll undoubtedly be able to connect with other awesome girls from around the world.

Games and Learning

While I perused some of the many stories and emails I have saved for writing about later, I noticed a theme popping up in a good number of them. It seems that educators are taking advantage of the hold video games have on young people these days by pulling some pretty impressive head fakes with them. Let's see what kids (and adults) are learning while playing.

I came across a list of 25 educational simulators and games on a distance learning website. It reminded me, first and foremost, of some of the classics I used to play as a kid. Take, for instance, Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I used to play the originals for hours on end (and with only the most basic of graphics and controls, too!). The same list goes on to suggest that Age of Empires will help you learn history, for example, and Railroad Tycoon will teach business skills. I was a bit sceptical about these choices at first, but after thinking about it, I guess I can see where they're coming from. Through the simulations involved, you would get a bit of a sense in how people used to live or what works in the business world, even if the actual details aren't entirely accurate.

My next example takes us away from traditional games to those you might call "edutainment".

[Immune Attack is] an educational video game that introduces basic concepts of human immunology to high school and entry-level college students. Designed as a supplemental learning tool, Immune Attack aims to excite students about the subject, while also illuminating general principles and detailed concepts of immunology.

The educational nature of this game is much less subtle than it is with games like Age of Empires. To master the game, students must learn about how the immune system works, plain and simple. It's also free, which is a whole lot cheaper than setting up complex labs to learn similar concepts (and it also means you can download it and try it for yourself!). It seems to be a successful concept; one commenter mused that "I wish we had had games like this when I was flunking advanced biology in 1969!"

In a news article about how technology is reshaping the face of classrooms in the States, 11-year-old Jemella Chambers talks about her experience with math software that has students compete against each other for the highest score by solving the most math equations. She's quoted as saying "This makes me learn better. It's like playing a game." The software is called FASTT Math and claims to "automatically differentiates instruction based on each student’s individual fluency levels in customized,10-minute daily sessions." Reminds me of the Train Your Brain activity that gets you to fill in the sign for a simple equation as fast as you can. Fun because you want to beat your previous time, and educational because you get really good at fast mental math.

As an added bonus, games seem to help bring out creativity in some students, according to a study described in this article. To quote, "in real-life terms, the study appears to indicate that after playing the game, happy or sad people are most creative, while angry or relaxed people are not." Perhaps there is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone here.

While relying on video games (or even computers in general) to replace all traditional forms of education doesn't sound like a very good idea, the power to engage students' interest cannot be ignored. Educational games can serve a very beneficial supplementary role in the classroom, and their design could be an interesting research topic for the computer scientist interested in software engineering or human computer interaction.

Evolution is Exciting

I suppose you've all heard about Spore by now. Many of you have probably already tried out the Creature Creator, too, since the full game isn't available yet. I haven't download it yet, and will probably just wait until I can get the full deal. There are also many other related projects to play with while we wait.

And if you don't know what's Spore's all about yet, the important piece of info is this: with Spore, you can "EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages - It’s survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization."

Sounds pretty cool. But while Will Wright had the insight and ability to turn evolution into a compelling video game, there are many more applications of the concept. Check out this article written by a friend and fellow Carleton U alumni, Elan Dubfrofsky. It's called The Ultimate Problemsolver: Computer + Evolution = Genius, and includes all kinds of interesting uses of evolution.

Take, for instance, the travelling salesman problem. It turns out it's not so easy to automatically figure out how to travel to an arbitrary number of cities, only once each except for a return home, in the shortest possible way. In fact, this problem is classified as NP-hard, and if the number of cities is large enough, only approximate solutions can be computed in any reasonable amount of time. But not to worry - by starting with some random solutions, mutating and recombining them, and finally filtering out the best solutions so far, we can eventually come up with a pretty darned good approximation of the best answer. We just need to give this process enough time. Ah, the beauty of evolution!

Another example that Elan points out is the design of an antenna for NASA, developed in 2006. Many very strange looking devices were suggested through this process of evolution, but once it was all said and done, the winning design really was the most fit for the job, consuming only a small amount of power and being easy to produce.

I've even talked about evolutionary techniques earlier in this post. After reading Elan's article, you might enjoy the discussion about the state of artificial intelligence and the evolution of a virtual checkers player. Be sure to read through the comments as well!

So the next time you are working on an optimization problem, ask yourself if you might be able to evolve a good solution rather than trial-and-error your own. Or just wait for Spore and watch evolution in action while creating some silly looking creatures on the side.

Give Your Photos a Cel-Shaded Look

Did you ever get the chance to play The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the Nintendo GameCube? If so, you may recall that the graphics of this game looked rather different from other games. The below image from Wikipedia gives a pretty good idea of what I mean.


Notice how it looks as though it was hand animated? This technique is called cel-shading, and although it appears to be a simplistic drawing made by hand, the process of achieving this kind of rendering on the computer is actually pretty complex.

According to the Wikipedia article on cel-shading, a 3D model is usually used as a starting point for creating this kind of image. To get the desired look, unconventional lighting is applied to the scene. For example, the way an object would look under normal lighting conditions would be calculated first. Then, each pixel that was lit would have its value discretized into a small number of specific ranges, taking away the smooth transition from dark to light and replacing it with something more abrupt. Of course, this is simplified, so have a look at the article to learn more about it.

Using tutorials like this one found at instructables.com, it's possible for you and I to create our own objects and have them appear cel-shaded. But wouldn't it be cool to be able to take our own photographs and have them automatically converted?

I recently found an article to be published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics called Flow-Based Image Abstraction. The authors have been working on improving the automatic conversion of a photograph to a rendering that looks a lot like cel-shading.

They break down the problem into two steps: creating a line drawing, and performing region smoothing.

To get the line drawing, they analyze the direction that colours are changing in an image to get a sense of where the lines should be. Think of this as the optical flow. This step is like a fancy edge detector (you may have heard of standard edge detectors, like Canny Edge Detector). The next image shows a comparison between other edge extraction techniques and that developed by the authors, seen at the far right (image directly from the paper):


In a separate process, unimportant details (in terms of colour) are removed from the insides of regions defined by the detected lines. After this, the two images can be combined together.

(Once again, things are more complicated than this; if you want the technical details of how this is accomplished, the paper outlines the steps very well.)

The following image summarizes the process (image directly from the paper).


So who knows - thanks to computer science at work, maybe this will be the newest filter in the next version of Photoshop, available for you to make some pretty cool artwork from your own photos!

Nintendo DS: First Impressions

As you know, I recently got a Nintendo DS. Now that I've messed around with it for just over a week, I have some first impressions that could be fun to look back on a year from now. The summary is that I played more video games this past week than I have for several years.

I've seen and read from several sources (like this episode of Good Game Stories) that women tend to be casual gamers who prefer to play for short periods of time when they have the opportunity between other jobs and projects. In fact, it seems that the majority of casual gamers are women. I have to say that this has proved to be quite true for me. Rather than sit for hours working away at a single game, my attention span seems to prefer messing around with something not too involved for a just few minutes.

The first game I tried out was Ninja Gaiden, and I was immediately impressed with the visuals. I thought it was really clever that the game had you hold the DS rotated, like a book (I would later discover that many games use this idea). Using the stylus for all navigation and fighting was another cool idea I hadn't seen before. I liked how the cut scenes looked like anime because I know the DS doesn't have a whole lot of memory. Why not have something "simple" look really good in favour of more complicated and less detailed 3D stuff that ends up looking kinda cheesy? Unfortunately, I couldn't concentrate on this game for long, as per above. We'll see if I go back to it later on.

Next, I found The Sims 2 DS at a discount price, so decided to give that a go. This game suited my tastes much better than Ninja Gaiden. Instead of having to attack non-ending bad guys all the time, I could take my time to explore Strangeville and complete goals at my own pace. It was easy to play for an extended period of time, and I could stop whenever I felt like it. This game was made in true 3D, as opposed to Ninja Gaiden's mixture of 2D backgrounds with 3D characters. This really surprised me - it's amazing what you can do with that little DS. Too bad the cut scene videos looked a little marginal.

Finally, I tried Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes A Day. Once again, this game was great for playing a few minutes here and there. But it wasn't the main training activities that I really liked; it was the Sudoku feature. I can't help but figure that having Sudoku in its own prominent section has more to do with capitalizing on the current craze than the usual brain training, a decision no doubt made by marketing. Nonetheless, seeing as I had never tried one of these puzzles before, I looked past this fact and solved a puzzle (can't hurt your brain!). Boy oh boy, are those things addictive!

It'll be interesting to see if I can keep up my video gaming for more than a few weeks. I would feel pretty down if I ended up neglecting my new toy after getting bored. For now, though, I can't wait to try out a few other games, especially The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass!