Stata DXFs, MITquest Interface

[Patrick Nichols <pnichols@graphics.csail.mit.edu>]

Hi Professor Teller,

Its good to hear you've safely arrived in Italy! I hope you're having a 
great time and enjoying Florence.

** BMG News **

On the BMG front, we've managed to get DXFs from Greg Knight and are 
inspecting them in the lab right now. It looks like they have a somewhat 
peculiar format, with ~100 layers and all kinds of stuff in them. Luka and 
Mike are currently assessing the odds of passing the DXFs (or some 
modified version of them) through the pipeline. We'll tell you more when 
we know.  Do you know when facilities belives they'll have a properly 
formatted version of this data?

** MITquest **

On MITquest: I designed a simple web interface for the application you 
described in your most recent email to the list -- take a look at 
http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~pnichols/research/mitquest to get an idea 
of what my current thinking is.

I have a broader question about MITquest: what role should this 
application play relative to the active signs I'm working on? When we 
spoke at the start of the term, I was under the impression that my main 
area of focus for my thesis was the active signage project. The 
route-finding software I'm writing will be highly portable and I should be 
able to deploy it as an applet (or some version of it), so getting 
*something* working isn't my main concern. I'm just wondering how this 
fits in context with the rest of my stuff.

** Other news **

I've touched based with Max Van Kleek (the interactive kiosk guy) and 
we're going to be working together in the term ahead. He will be a client 
of my route-finding and display software, which should stress-test the 
reliability and portability of my code.  He has done a lot of work on 
agent-based architectures for intelligently displaying events (in his 
case, news items pulled from sources like BBC) and will help me my 
event-display logic.

If you google "active signage", my research page and thesis proposal are 
the top listed links. 

Thats about it for now. TA'ing 6.837 is quite a bit of fun, and I feel 
like I'm learning more about the subject a 2nd time around. Thanks once 
again for securing the TAship for me.

--Patrick

-- 
* * *

Patrick James Nichols II
Graduate Student, MIT Computer Graphics Group
http://graphics.csail.mit.edu/~pnichols