Made by Mark

Block websites using a IP-filter

mark — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:25:08 +0000

With this simple tool, you can block distracting websites accross all browsers.

Tech talk
The tool converts URLs to IP-adresses, and lets you download a filter (*.p2p) file.
This file can be used in PeerBlock; free software that allows you to block IP-adresses.
It has a handy button to allow HTTP-traffic for 15 or 60 minutes, if you want to take a break from work and mail/facebook/etc again. (Btw, you might need to refresh / clear the browser cache before the website fails to load!)

Music Generation with Restricted Boltzmann Machines

mark — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:22:57 +0000

Initial pilot: Music Generation from Mouse Coordinates.
I used a stack of Restricted Boltzmann Machines to reduce the dimensionality of small MIDI patches back to two dimensions. These are hooked to the mouse, so you can regenerate these samples by moving your mouse.

Music Generation using gestures.
I used a Factored Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (fCRBM) to modulate the transition between frames of MIDI-notes using features extracted from gestures. Based on the work of Graham Taylor, who used fCRBMs to generate walking motions that are modulated by a style-label.

Click read more for a youtube video!

I have no demonstration of the final project yet; but feel free to contact me for more information.
Key points:

Preprocessing, Training and offline generation is done in Matlab
Gesture recording, online generation and music output is done in Max/MSP
“Processing” visualises notes and gesture input, to improve user-consistency of gestures
An Android phone is used for gesture input (Touch XY, or Acceleratometer + Orientaiton sensor)
Alternatively, Ruud Barth’s Music Glove can be used (Finger-tracking using a Wii-mote)
Can learn 1200 frames (1:30 min) of real MIDI music
Software capable of real-time, online generation (however, results are not good)
Offline generation results from an unseen gesture trial are reasonable
This discrepancy is probably due to an intolerance to user inconsistency between trials?

The Learningbox

mark — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:55:48 +0000

The Learningbox is digital learning environment for MBO-schools. I extended the functionality of the existing web-application. My work involved, among other things:

HTML, Javascript, CSS with a ASP + MySQL back-end
A Drag & Drop user interface in Javascript.
Creating a comprehensive overview page for student grades, using complex MySQL queries. I used AJAX to display additional information in mouse-over popups. AJAX.
An user-interface to find students by class, course, name, etc. I needed to take user permissions into account and used AJAX to retrieve results faster.
Exporting information in various formats, such as XML and CSV

I worked part-time in june-october 2010; and again in february-april 2011.

Novatouch

mark — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:49:03 +0000

Novatouch is a desktop application designed for touchscreen PCs. It provides a user-friendly interface to various computer tasks. People are able to video-call by touching a photo (using Skype), view photos, get reminders about important events, listen to music, etcetera.

I implemented the first prototype in 2007. This version consisted of the agenda, phone, music and photos modules. I also did the initial graphical design for the user interface. After that, other people have developed the product further; improving the core and renewing the graphical design. In 2010-2011 I was involved again. This time, I worked in a small team to fix bugs and extend functionality.

Novatouch is developed in Delphi7, and I have experience with:

Sending and retrieving E-Mails using POP3/SMTP; working with attachments and multipart text/html attachments
Controlling Skype, using the Skype API
Using the windows API to manipulate windows
Using MySQL in Delphi7
Media playback
Internet browsing
Using SVN to work with other programmers

Novatouch: Webagenda

mark — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:30:05 +0000

I developed the user interface and the PHP+MySQL back-end for this simple webagenda. It allows users to view and edit appointments and reminders of a Novatouch user. Also, users can check whether the reminders have been seen or not.

User interface of an Energy Price Web Calculator

mark — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:06:49 +0000

Reed Business approached GipHouse to develop a web-application that calculates the energy prices on www.bouwkosten.nl. We worked in a small team according to the waterfall method with GIT version control. I was responsible for the user interface, which was done in ASP.NET with C#, MySQL and HTML with a little JS and CSS.

The main challenge was creating a user-friendly interface. The calculator required many input parameters – some of which were depended on each other. To make this user-friendly, I splat the inputs into multiple steps. This way, the user was not confused by inputs suddenly changing because of dependence. Every previous step was summarized succinctly, so the user remained aware of the all input parameters. This short summary also preserved the precious screen space required to display the results (a large table).

To summarize:

User interface design
HTML with a little JS and CSS
ASP.NET with C#
MySQL database
GIT version control
Waterfall method
Small team for a (virtual) software house (GipHouse)

I worked part-time from februari to june 2010 on this project.

AdaBoosted Neural Networks

mark — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:57:09 +0000

Backprop and R-prop Neural Networks, boosted using the AdaBoost-M2 algorithm.
Applied on the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits.
Implemented in Java and Matlab, and Processing is used to visualize the classified digits.

Created for my two favorite courses: Datamining and Neural Networks (2009, second year courses).

You can download the sourcecode, read the documentation and view the changelog here (JAM Networks; Java And Matlab Neural Networks).

This project was a huge learning experience in:

Neural Networks, particulary Backprop and R-Prop
Pattern recognition pipeline; preprocessing using PCA
AdaBoost-M1 and AdaBoost-M2 algorithms
Crossfold validation
Java Arrays and memory management (quite horrible if poorly understood!)
Processing (and integrating it with Matlab!)
Matlab