Apr 25, 2012 · 0 Comments
Last Fall, SAVO’s management team introduced the first of many Innovation Challenges - employee side projects whose goal is to “showcase innovations that are very focused… and address a specific business problem.” First, second, and third place cash prizes are handed out for top entries. Today, two of my coworkers and I submitted SAVO Desktop - a Windows desktop application designed to provide real-time notifications relating to SAVO content that the user has “subscribed” to (think “following” a la Twitter).
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Mar 1, 2012 · 0 Comments
“It will get harder before it gets easier.”
Those parting words were spoken to me by Benjamin Day and Chad Albrecht, two speakers at last week’s ALM Chicago conference. The intent of attending the conference was to learn more about Agile Development methodologies in order to apply them towards improving my team’s development processes - it was a great success. Below are some key takeaways from various speakers combined with my own thoughts:
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Dec 16, 2011 · 0 Comments
A few months ago, I created KinecTunes, a program which utilizes the Kinect to control iTunes.
What went wrong
There were two main issues that I didn’t initially account for:
- Sensitivity to noise: Using the SDK example out of box resulted in the Kinect recognizing a lot of false positive commands. This was a big issue - it would randomly interpret lyrics in music as commands and begin to play a new song! Luckily, each time a command is interpreted, the confidence level is passed as an argument; by requiring 90% (or more) confidence, I drastically reduced the number of false positives to effectively zero.
- Difficulty recognizing voice commands if it is too close to the computer speakers: The same problem occurs when using Kinect with the Xbox due to the TV’s volume being too loud at times. One solution for this (suggested by a user) is moving the Kinect away from any noise outputs as much as possible. Of course, this only helps so much.
What went right
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