Computer Science shows off its stuff

Today was our Computer Science department’s Research in Action day — a big room is booked, it’s filled with smart people, industry professionals are invited, and good things happen.

A few projects stood out:

ILoveSketch

Designing physical objects is tricky because you have to use a 2D surface (pen and paper, a digital tablet) to model a 3D shape.

This is where ILoveSketch comes in. It’s a digital system that lets designers use conventional drawing techniques to produce 3D curves.

Here’s Seok-Hyung Bae giving a demo:

A few months ago, the video demo was going around the tubes of the internets and it has about 200k views so far. Give it a whirl — it’s a great watch.

CognoVision

Advertising is a trust game: marketers have to be sure that their money is actually earning eyeballs.

For old mediums, there are tried and true techniques for figuring this out — Nielsen ratings for TV, for instance. But for newer forms of advertising, how do you guarantee to advertisers that they’re reaching an audience?

CognoVision provides a solution specifically for digital signage — they embed a video camera in a display terminal and using fancy image processing, they figure tell you how many people are actually looking at the screen. It can even break these stats down by things like gender.

Here’s what it looks like. Next to the Castrol ad is what their software sees and analyzes (that’s me standing next to their Director of Business Development). Viewership metrics are displayed underneath:

Strictly speaking, they’re not a research project or even from UofT. But UofT grad students did most of the development.

More details

But that certainly wasn’t it. The full list of projects can be found here