Research

Professor Barr’s research interests currently span two fields: the use of mobile technology and computer systems. Contemporary culture has become centered around phones and tablets and much of the computation done in many fields is now performed with these devices. Professor Barr’s research explores the use of mobile devices in general but especially in ways that provide for social good and for education. 

There are currently several opportunities for students to participate in creating solutions involving apps in several areas including:

• Development of a cross-platform app that simulates electron magnetic fields.  You would be working with physics students to create animations for iOS and Android devices.
• Working with physical therapy students on the development of an app to monitor nutritional needs of athletes.
• Continuing the development of an accessibility app that maps accessible routes on the Ithaca College campus.
• Developing an app that helps students with food security.

In addition, Prof. Barr is exploring the use of FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) in the classroom.  FPGAs are hardware devices that can be reconfigured using a special hardware design language.  Using this language, we can create processors, memory, and specialized hardware devices for applications like machine learning.  In this project you would be exploring a hardware design language and developing materials for using FPGAs in various system classes. 

Prof. Stansfield’s research is focused on two areas:

1) Building and programming robot mobility devices for infants with motor impairment.  This on-going effort, called Tots-on-Bots, has produced the WeeBot, a mobile robot based device that is controlled intuitively:  The robot moves in the direction that the baby leans (for example to reach for a toy.)  Studies with our current device have shown that infants as young as 5 months old can learn to drive the WeeBot.  Continuing work is focused on building a less expensive device, porting the control software to this new robot, and doing a larger study with young children with motor impairment.

2) Developing VR systems to delivery Occupational and Physical Therapies. Our initial effort used VR to augment rehabilitation for young children with upper limp impairment by gamifying the therapy within VR to make it less repetitive and boring.  Our current effort uses VR to create an environment for rehabilitation of balance disorders.

Doug Turnbull's research focuses on building novel applications to help people discover, enjoy and benefit from music. During the summer of 2019, the students in his JimiLab will likely work on three related music tech projects:

1. Localify: a web app that explores how we can help Spotify users to discover local musicians
2. Long-Tail Playlist Recommendation: developing novel playlist algorithms to help people discover artists who are not normally recommended by commercial music service
3. Content-based Song Selection: exploring the use of deep learning models for "next song selection" on a music playlist 

To learn more, check out Doug's Lab. Also, feel free to drop by Doug's office to talk shop and pitch your own ideas involving music technology, machine learning, or recommender systems.