SigBio: Smile and Say "Cheese"

By Romesh Kumbhani

After 150 hours of design work, 300 hours of laborious, hard-core coding, and the digestion of approximately 6500 calories of various carbonated beverages, the SIGBio Project is finally completed. I would like to congratulate the design and development team of Mary Lee, Ibrahim Merchant, Sabrina Merchant, David Hargis, and of course yours truly. "Say Cheese" would not have been the same without all of you.

For those that have yet to hear of our great endeavor, SIGBio has developed a facial recognition program called "Say Cheese". Utilizing an NTSC camera, a Brooktree 848 based card, and some cutting-edge C code (in the time frame of millenia), we have developed a technique to authenticate users based on facial images. Unlike current techniques that require hours of training, our program can be train to recognize a face in one sitting (one training). Also, the program takes into account lighting, face rotation, and even can differentiate between photographs and real people. It dices, slices and jullianes. "It's all good."

If you're interested in learning more about "Say Cheese" and other biostatistical programs, please contact SIGBio at sigbio@acm.uiuc.edu or come to our weekly meetings (6:00, Tuesdays, 1225 DCL). If biostatistics isn't your "cup of tea", SIGBio explores all fields of Computers and Biology and we open to any ideas you may have. See you at the next meeting!

SigBiz

SigBiz doesn't have an EOH project, but we are working hard to bring you a great talk on NEW COMPANY START-UPS. Herbert Edelsbrunner will be sharing some of his thoughts on his own company startup Raindrop Geomagic (www.geomagic.com). Raindrop Geomagic is a company that started here in the Champaign-Urbana Area and has just recently moved to North Carolina. Raindrop Geomagic, Inc. is a software company dedicated to providing the most technologically advanced and cost-effective solutions for geometric modeling of 3D objects. The company is founded by the world's foremost experts and eminent software designers in the field of computational geometry and topology. He will be sharing some of his vast business and technology expertise in 2240 DCL on March 9th at 7pm.

SigGraph

By Brian Klamik

Our EOH Project was supposed to be a real-time true-physics simulation/game of hovercrafts displayed in 3D. Microsoft made a donation of Force Feedback joysticks so that players could feel the forces being applied to their crafts. However, the person who was building the true-physics engine was hired out of graduate school, and the project suffered a severe loss. The resulting game is made with flexible components, so that they could be easily crafted to do any task. We decided to try to make any 3d networked game and prepare to use the resulting work tword next year's project.

After our EOH project, Sounds & Visions preparations begin quickly, and we NEED more people to help out with the graphics work. Go here to listen to the music and sign up for a song.

SigMusic

By Ken Wronkiewicz

This Engineering Open House, SigMusic, the Special Interest Group for Computers and Music, has two main projects to show off. For our first project, we are going to demonstrate the latest in electronic music, including some new musical tools we've written. The level of features in free or nearly free music software for the PC has improved greatly over the past year or two, giving us some advanced packages that take advantage of the power of today's PCs to create new music. Our current preferred package, Buzz, allows anybody to extend it's built in capabilities to create music. We've written some music and some new extensions for it and we'll be showing them off. Furthermore, members of SigMusic will be showing off their latest musical compositions and demonstrating how they created them. As our second project, in cooperation with SigGraph, we'll be playing tapes of recent Sounds and Visions computer music and graphics concerts in 1320 DCL on Saturday.

Other events coming up that we are part of is the Sounds and Visions show on April 16th and 17th, and a SigMusic concert in the Courtyard Cafe in the Illini Union on April 18th.

SigOps: Turret of Death

SigOps is the Special Interest Group for Operating System development, and this year for engineering open house we built a laser guided turret of death! Yep that is right, one minute you are just minding your own business and the next minute, you are illuminated by a laser and the "turret of death" acquires you. Luckly, the next step is not death, because the "turret of death" only shoots foam disks. SigOps primarily does operating system development, but this year we decided to take on this fun project which required both the design of a computer controlled turret and a camera based targeting system. The turret itself if totally autonomous and just requires its target to be illuminated with laser light. Of course for anything mechanical we have had our ups and downs with the actual construction of the turret. We have proved that ACM'ers are good programmers, but only average mechanical engineers.

On the operating systems front, we have received sorf funding to purchase a embedded 386 development board that we will be designing a embedded operating system for after engineering open house. So if you are interested in operating systems, and have always wanted to build one come to the next SigOps meeting. We meet at 7pm on tuesedays, or check out our Roll Your Own OS Workshop.

SigUNIX

By Frank Tobin

The time has come for EOH, and SigUNIX is up and among the presenters this year, showing off a possible modern UNIX desktop setting, and the many features one can have from using UNIX even in small network. The main feature of our presentation will be Gnomon, our Gtk-based, modular monitoring tool.

Gnomon's purpose is to eliminate the dozens, if not hundreds of monitoring programs that are already out there, and bring it down to one, modular program, that is easy for ordinary users to create new modules for. We can monitor not only CPU, RAM usage, email-boxes, and webpages, but anything type of data-gathering you could write, in any almost any language that you want, and even displayed in a number of different manners.

To simply writing data-gathering plugins, we have a Perl library to make plugin-writing as easy as possible. For many purposes, you only have write three lines of code to use this library!

SigUNIX is the general-UNIX interest group, and meets on Thursdays at 7:00 in the ACM office, and uses the newsgroup uiuc.org.acm.sigunix. Feel free to stop by if you have any questions, or would be interested in joining.

WinDevils

By Ibrahim Merchant

Well, the WinDevils EOH project was a huge success. The long lines for viewing our project almost created a safety hazard DCL. Ironically, our project overshadowed the projects of the very SIG groups that made fun of us. Ironically tragic or is it tragically ironic? If you were astonished by the creativity and genius demonstrated by the WinDevil members at EOH -- join us!

E-mail imerchan@uiuc.edu for more info. And for those of you who thought our project was going to tank -- never count us out. I love to play the underdog. The people who quit the project throughout its development -- you should have had faith. Now who is laughing? Never underestimate the power of Ghetto Pride! Westside!!!

I would like to end the last Banks article I write on behalf of WinDevils with a quote about our EOH presentation:

The greatest trick the (Win)Devil ever pulled was convincing the world its project never existed.

Peace out -- its been fun.

A special "word up" to my homies back in the hood (and in prison).

Another special thanks to the WinDrunk team that turned a dream into reality:

Joseph Brucker
David Hargis
Joel Hegg
Ash Wise
Andrew Wu