This is an update of my presentation about art-science as an interdisciplinary activity, and why I like to do it, which I gave at Napier Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation. Not very text based, so might not be coherent on it's own!

art-sci title page

This page is a record of some of the field recordings I've created. So far they are all created with a Zoom H4 and homemade contact mics and hydrophones. The sounds are only processed to remove noise introduced by the recording equipment, and occasionally EQ'd to bring out certain noises.

I often find that I want to do more advanced queries of airports/cities than search engines allow, e.g. find me large cities which I can fly to from both these places and not have to travel more than 50km at the end.

Short version: how to view the geolocated molecules:

• install the Layar browser
• be in Cambridge
• look for the "cambridgemolecules" or "Cambridge Molecules" layer

This is how I setup the backend for the geolocated molecules, using Hoppala to provide hosting and editing for a Layar layer. Layar indexes Points of Interest (POIs) with associated information and URIs. These can then be picked up by the Layar browser on a mobile device, in order to create the 3D overlay on reality. However, Layar doesn't host the files itself; one option is to use Hoppala, which both hosts and allows for easy editing of POIs and metadata.

This is a description of the conversion process for importing molecular structures into Layar: converting the PDB files into the format Layar uses, importing these files into Hoppala and placing them within a layer.

This is a quick mashup, to create an augmented reality layer of molecular models for the PMR2011 Hackfest in Cambridge.

As part of the work I'm doing, we wanted to look at how likely certain areas are to be developed. We wanted to separate out areas which would definitely be developed, definitely not be developed and those which were "up for grabs".

There are several different scenarios about future development, which each provide a coherent set of parameters for the model. The model is also stochastic, so there are 30 runs for each scenario to give probabilistic futures.

I've repeatedly come across the need to read or write Raster files in Java. These are data files which represent a rectangular grid of data using ASCII representations of numbers. An example, from [1]:

ncols 157
 
nrows 171
 
xllcorner -156.08749650000
 
yllcorner 18.870890200000
 
cellsize 0.00833300
 
nodata_value -9999
 
0 0 1 1 1 2 3 3 5 6 8 9 12 14 18 21 25 30 35 41 47 53
 
59 66 73 79 86 92 97 102 106 109 112 113 113 113 111 109 106

All values can be doubles or ints.

Crowdsourcing refers to using the general population to carry out tasks, often for free. Often, the idea is that by combining many inputs of unknown or variable quality, high quality outputs can be created - either through selection or some form of organisation.