In early 2014 Tony DeRose (Senior Scientist and Lead of the Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios ) and Elyse Klaidman (Director of Pixar University and Archives) approached Khan Academy with an idea. They wanted to answer a question everyone asks in school at some point: “Why do I need to learn this?” Previously, Tony had given talks which try and engage children in mathematics by demonstrating how math lives at the intersection of design and technology at Pixar. It was clear that you could motivate kids to learn math and science by showing them how concepts they encounter in school are used at Pixar to make movie magic…Continue reading →
It’s powerful to understand how conditional probability can be visualized using decision trees. I wanted to create an alternative to most explanations which often start with many abstractions. I was drawn to the idea of looking at the back pages of a choose-your-own-adventure book, and deciding how you could have arrived there. Here I present a visual method using a story involving coins… allowing you to decide how to formalize. Once we grow tired of growing trees, we may ask the key questions: how can we speed up this process?:
This is followed by a game I designed (built by Peter Collingridge) which introduces how branches can be weighted instead of counted.
In order to understand the subtle conceptual shifts leading to the insights behind Information Theory, I felt a historical foundation was needed. First I decided to present the viewer with a practical problem which future mathematical concepts will be applied to. Ideally this will allow the viewer to independently develop key intuitions, and most importantly, begin asking the right kind of questions:
I noticed the viewer ideas for how to compress information (reduce plucks) fell into two general camps. The first are ways of using differentials in time to reduce the number of plucks. The second are ways of making different kind of plucks to increase the expressive capability of a single pluck. Also, hiding in the background is the problem of what to do about character spaces. Next I thought it would be beneficial to pause and follow a historical narrative (case study) exploring this problem. My goal here is two congratulate the viewer for independently realizing a previously ‘revolutionary’ idea, and at the same time, reinforcing some conceptual mechanics we will need later. It was also important to connect this video to previous lessons on the origins of our alphabet (a key technology in our story), providing a bridge from proto-aphabets we previously explored….
This is followed by a simulation which nails down the point that each state is really a decision path
Lately I have been thinking about ways of blending various aspects of history into math/science lessons on Khan Academy. The traditional model of: lesson, experiment, lesson, experiment makes sense – though it’s important to do the experiment part in a natural way. All experiments begin with observations in the real world. So, I’m going to make a series of short silent videos which reenact observations made by our ancestors and first inventions/technologies which result.
Later on, lessons using modern technology can reference these videos (Karl mentioned we could call them Building Blocks) as experimental foundations everyone can understand. In this case I begin with a simple video of someone finding rocks in a river with seemingly magical properties. Then these properties are harnessed to create new things. This will lead us into electromagnetism, and more modern inventions such as the telegraph. Check out the progress here
One of the most exciting aspects of joining the Khan Academy team, was the potential to explore new ways of integrating video and software. Continue reading →
How many five letter words are there? This many!…if you put one word on each page.
Finished an interesting 3D composite (and modeling) effect with for episode #1 of www.artoftheproblem.net. Working on this effect to help demonstrate the huge number of five letter word combinations if you enumerate them all with one on each page of paper. Planning to use Blender for the CGI paper stack. The idea is to have a stack of paper reaching 1.2 km high. Here was my process…. Continue reading →
I recently launched Art of the Problem on Kickstarter.com which is an interesting new crowd sourced funding network for creative projects. A total of 88 people pledged to the project and my $4,000 funding goal was reached. As of today (May 13th 2011) production work has commenced on the pilot episode titled ‘Gambling with Secrets’, soon to be available at www.youtube.com/artoftheproblem.
The purpose of this post is to propose a solution to the following future research directions offered in two papers on the Algorithmic Music Evolution Engine (AMEE) “A Flexible Music Composition Engine” and “Real-Time Emotional Adaptation in Automated Composition”, recently developed at UWO (Hoeberechts, Demopoulos, Katchabaw 2007)[10][11]. I’ve divided up the problems into two high level categories A and B: Continue reading →
Last year, the development of Robot 1.1 was an experiment in electrical Engineering and the Psychology (In terms of rhythmic human-computer interaction). It is a hardware interface which interprets ambient sound as structured pulses (using low pass filter, peak detector and tempo filter circuits) that are fed into a microcontroller which controls a solenoid powered drum stick (see previous post for video):
I have been pondering both applications and new directions for this technology. One of the main questions I kept running into while working on this project, was the question of response time. In order for a rhythmic system to be interactive, it must operate in real time. The hardware aspects of Robot 1.1 were very effective at generating a real time response. Although, the functionality was limited: Continue reading →
This Report will explore the past and current research into the areas of Beat Induction, Rhythm Recognition and percussive improvisation.First we must ask, why? In terms of current robotic systems, most focus simply on sound production (Mechanically reproducing a set of static instructions) and rarely address perceptual aspects of musicianship, such as listening, analysis, improvisation and interaction with human input. There has been some breakthrough work done on improvisation and robotic percussion in the last few years which will be explored. First we will introduce the problem of beat induction and the varying methods by which it can be achieved. We will then attempt to clearly understand how this problem will be applied to our robotic system. Furthermore we will show how we can use state-of-the-art research into similar robotic systems as a guide and stepping stone for our project.
A few years ago when I was introduced to Borges I was moved by the idea of a complete library. His short story, Library of Babel, most importantly reminded me of the difference between the infinite and the very very large. Continue reading →
In 1948 Claude Shannon wrote a paper entitled ‘The Mathematical Theory of Communication,’ later expanding this into a book by the same name. Shannon’s work was the foundation to the stunning achievements of information theory. In many respects, Shannon’s work deserves recognition as the foundation of complexity theory as well. Continue reading →
I Spent some time this summer aside from school & work playing more improvisational jazz piano. I enjoy jazz because once you can place your mind in the time & space of jazz you can experience the thrill of it, even as a beginner (like me). This thrill being a dual sense of unknowing and knowing: The understanding of where you can go with musical statements, while being unsure of the actual execution or path to take. All the while being aware of some passing feeling that undulates with the music. Lately I’ve been a huge fan of Brad Mehldau – performance video.
I had a jam recorded with some friends in Waterloo last week – it was rough around the edges, but great a space to play in.
Also, I’ve acquired some old studio lights this summer and I experimented with them by making a jazz video. A guy named Luke brought over his Moog Theremin to try out as well – it’s a crazy device:
Brit Cruise 
