Abstract: It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to show the rest of the RI what I and my various collaborators have been working on. So this talk will be an informal and rapid-fire tour through some of the freshest results from my lab, including work that is in press, in submission, and in progress. (This is not a public disclosure; keep this information confidential to Carnegie Mellon!)

    Topics will span a spectrum of different approaches inside my larger Creative Tools (“building hardware, software, and ideas to help people make things”) research agenda, including novel low-level techniques: a report on a experiments we’ve done with paint-on capacitive sensing for robots [by undergraduate interns Vicky Zou from CMU and Xiaoyu Liang from Cornell], and a method of making non-mirroring infinity mirrors [a solo(!) side project]; new mathematical ideas: an update on our machine knitting formalization work highlighting a new polynomial-time program equivalence checker(!) [by UW PhD student Nat Hurtig with collaborators from UW, Utah]; design space explorations: high-level themes emerging from a survey of how autistic adults perceive fabric [by RI PhD student Gabrielle Ohlson and collaborators in S3D], and some experiments making fold-up furniture using a quilting machine [by CMU undergraduate Sapna Tayal with collaborators from HCII]; and, of course, fabrication machine designs: discussion of the updated (v3) solid knitting machine prototype [by RI PhD Student Yuichi Hirose with collaborators from HCII].

    In the unlikely event that time permits, I will also show a series of demonstrations of classic results, including some from my PhD and my time at Disney, which I am putting together for a talk next week; and I may also showcase some as-yet-to-be-determined results from our lab jam, which is happening between when I am writing the abstract and the faculty lunch.

Note: none of the work I will be presenting is far enough along to appear on the web. However, for completeness, my lab page is https://textiles-lab.github.io/ and my research web page is http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jmccann/ .