DNA

	Spring Quarter 1997	Project Team:
	Project Sponsor:	Alp Sendil	(Manager)
	Gregory Abowd	Enda Sullivan	(Architect) & (QA)
		Bob Sumner	(Programmer)
		Lynn Bacher	(Technical Writer)

Table of Contents

1. Schedule
2. Project Description
3. Related Documents
4. Project Roles
5. Deliverables
6. Document Revision History

I. Schedule

To see a copy of the schedule click here.

We like cool images. Cool images are useful. By cool, we mean something that is aesthetic, pleasing to look at, or causes a person to say, "wow, cool picture dude!" They can be soothing paintings on your living room wall or interesting backgrounds on your computer screen. We want to create a program that can learn what a cool image is, and then create them. Genetic Art, as we call it, may be displayed on your refrigerator, or on an LCD in your living room; just add a frame to go around the screen. The picture would periodically update its self, creating new cool images. This relates to the Domisilica project where computers are integrated into the home.

The criteria used to evaluate "cool" would come from an application that we place on the World Wide Web (see demo). Our program on the web would display nine images, asking the user to select their top choices. Periodically, the 'votes' would be counted up and the 'coolest' image would be selected for your viewing pleasure. The generation process takes the users' top three choices and creates nine more images. Of these, a "winner" is chosen and is displayed on a separate page. The program "learns" from these choices to produce cool pictures, and by placing them on your living room wall (or kitchen) you will enjoy the comforts of you modern domicile even more.

We decided to use fractals for our cool images. The project will require some knowledge of CGI/Perl and HTML for the evaluating the criteria and also requires C to construct the fractals. Since the pictures take some time to generate (a minute or two) we decided that C would be the best developing tool for the job. The images will be created and saved to GIF format, then transferred to the web server, where they may be judged. The update will occur periodically (once every hour or less).

We will be using a program called xFractInt to generate our fractal images. There are two similar projects, International Interactive Genetic Art and John Mount' s International Interactive Genetic Art II from which we have drawn ideas. This project could have a future not only as an added feature of Domisilica, but also ccould be used in marketing schemes to generate images based on social profiles.

III. Related Documents

The following are sites that have been of interest to this project:

International Interactive Genetic Art

• A genetic art voting page. Not very intuitive, but has pretty pictures.

John Mount's International Interactive Genetic Art II

• A similar genetic art voting page. It uses a slightly different method of learning than ours will. It also has a history page, where you can view past generations of the pictures.

Designing Calm Technology

• An interesting paper on "Calm Technology". "The result of calm technology is to put us at home, in a familiar place."

Domisilica

• "Domisilica is a project which not only provides a way for you to access the information which is part of your home, but also allows you to associate additional virtual information of all sorts with your abode. Virtual information might include the purchase date of groceries, shopping lists, or pictures." We hope to add our project to Domisilica's environment at some point.

IV. Project Roles

Project Manager Alp Sendil	1. Prepares and maintains project schedule 2. Organizes and runs project meetings 3. Concerned with overall direction of project and allocation of resources
Architect Enda Sullivan	1. Lead technical person on team 2. Understands and documents overall organization of system 3. Leads programming effort
Technical Writer Lynn Bacher	1. Maintains project notebook 2. Oversees quality of organization and writing for all documents 3. Webmaster
Programmer Bob Sumner	1. Learns any/all programming environments 2. Trains others in environment and maintains control of source code 3. Develops code with help from architect, but mainly interested in details of getting things working
Quality Assurance	1. Define how software will be tested 2. Oversee testing of software 3. Checking to see that requirements of the project are upheld Note: We do not have a separate position for QA on our team. The duties will mainly be spread over the Manager, Architect, and Technical Writer.

V. Deliverables