I spent the summer of 2005 as a Production Intern at Crystal Dynamics, a video game development studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked primarily with John Chowanec, a senior producer at Crystal, and we were part of a four person team that worked on the concept development and pitch of a new title. I gained experience in many aspects of production while at Crystal; I developed schedules using Microsoft Project, workflows using Microsoft Visio, and conducted data acquisition and analysis using Microsoft Excel. I also created a comprehensive production exam which will be used in the interview process of future Crystal production candidates.

The Interbots Initiative was a Spring '05 ETC project. Consisting of 10 students from artistic and technical backgrounds, the IBI team worked together to design and create a portable, interactive animatronic character, and engaging entertaining experiences with that character. My contribution included managing the business and legal aspects of the project (including the negotiation of a licensing agreement), technical writing and documentation, and assisting with the fabrication of mechanical parts. Our work was accepted to SIGGRAPH 2005's Emerging Technologies Exhibition as well as the 2005 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, where I delivered 20 minute talks on our work.

Taken during their first semester at the ETC, Building Virtual Worlds is a course in which teams of 4 students work in two week cycles to design and develop interactive experiences utilizing a wide variety of multimedia platforms. Teams can work with virtual reality headmount displays, the Jam-O-Drum (a 4-person interactive table), a Sony AIBO robotic dog, and Quasi, the ETC's interactive animatronic character.

As part of my graduate research in human-robot interaction at the University of South Florida, I designed a color-based interface for expressing a robot's current emotional state to humans and other robots in its environment. I surveyed the existing literature on human color-emotion associations and the use of color in animals to convey information between and within species. I then conducted an experiment to determine how humans would interpret color displays on robots. The results of the survey and experiment were used to propose a color-emotion convention for emotive robot interfaces.

A graduate course I took at the University of South Florida, HCI taught the fundamentals of good user-interface design. Over the semester I worked in 2-person project groups to design interfaces for a voice-activated web browser and a remote virtual classroom. Storyboard prototypes were constructed for each interface in 2 weeks using Photoshop and Flash.

I worked on the Pioneer project for my undergraduate CS and Engineering Robotics classes and as a part of the HMC Robotics Design team. I worked in a 3 person team to write custom software for the robot that enabled it to autonomously navigate a complex system of hallways to locate and retrieve Coca-Cola cans. We presented our work at Harvey Mudd College's 2001 Presentation Days.