portfolio

Lake Tahoe elevation model with Bathymetry 3D 🔗

SF Housing Prices and Population 3D 🔗

SF Pavement Quality and Housing Prices 🔗

Minesweeper 🔗

AC Milan vs Juventus 🔗 - Interactive visual analysis of over 100 years of football matches.

Grepvine 🔗 - A Chrome extension that brings great discussions to a browser near you.

Rangefindr 🔗 - Explore Flickr’s best pictures near you or anywhere else in the world!

YourMOM 🔗 - Conscious moderation of computing through an ambient/emotional feedback system.

Last.fm stats 🔗 - Which city in the U.S listens to the most obscure music?

Hypothesis: I can think of obscurity in musical preferences in two ways. One way is to ask how many people listen to the same songs that you listen to. The larger the number of people that share your playlist, the less obscure is your music. Another way to think about it is to ask how many times were the songs in your playlist played by other people? The higher this number is, the higher is your preference for popular music. I think of the first measure as a reflection of the mainstream nature of your music and the second, a reflection of the popularity of the music in terms of how much it was liked by those who listened to it. The hypothesis could be validated by observing a correlation between these two measures and also by their conformance with what we intuitively know about the cities in this comparison. For instance, we would expect San Francisco to be on the more obscure end of this spectrum due to the diversity of its cosmopolitan population and their general preference for underground music and independent artists.

Schoolog 🔗 - Your school on the semantic web.

Man vs. Machine 🔗 - Compare tagging by humans to the tags generated by machines.

Memex 🔗 - A chrome extension that helps you create memex like trails of web pages as you surf!

The idea behind my memex implementation is this - browsing the web and navigating from one uri to another is analogous to creating a trail of information. I have created a plugin that like a camera allows the user to click record after which every uri navigation in the browser gets saved as a memex trail.

OSS and the Hybrid Strategy for Corporations 🔗

Written two years after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, and two months after the launch of the first stable version of LibreOffice, this paper explains why Hybrid models attempting to leverage open source communities to drive corporate growth often fail. The open source model represents a socio-technical niche and cannot be fully transferred and merged with traditional profit maximizing models. This paper concludes with an analysis of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and its attempts to create a hybrid strategy for using the open source MySQL and OpenOffice.org projects for commercial growth. This analysis will highlight the concepts developed throughout the thesis and explain how motivation, network effects and self-organization in the OSS community will influence the outcome of a hybrid strategy.

Economics of Open Source 🔗

F/OSS is a valuable commodity in the market, whether one considers its value as imputed or not. Despite the common assumption that F/OSS developers are altruists giving away valuable software for free, there are established economics theories that can explain that individuals and firms are maximizing some utility function while using and creating OSS. Strategic games can be used to analyze and explain why firms give away software as open source and for free. Economics can also explain why one form of OSS licenses may be better than others in a given market situation. Public licenses such as BSD are a good strategy in the absence of a direct competitor, but viral licenses such as GPL prevent competitors from hoarding software enhancements and are a good strategy in competitive markets. F/OSS is not only about releasing software for free along with its source code but there are several business models that can be built around a F/OSS system.

Collaboration Challenges at a High Tech Company 🔗

A software product group at High Tech Company, a technology giant, faces collaboration challenges in an increasingly global and fragmented work environment. The group is comprised of software developers, business analysts, product consultants, technical writers and trainers. With teams located in different time zones, and employees working from home, communication and collaboration issues arise. Data from eleven phone interviews and forty-seven surveys was gathered and analyzed over a three month period to identify collaboration barriers. Established collaboration frameworks in academic research were applied, which lead to possible solutions to these issues. Our study shows that an insular work culture, self- reliance, physical distance, information overload, and weak ties between employees, all pose challenges to effective communication and collaboration.