Paper about ChalkBoard Submitted to ASEE

The FPG group at KU just submitted a new paper about using ChalkBoard for video processing to the 2010 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Midwest Section.

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  Improving the Presentation of Technical Material in Video Talks using Post Production. In this paper, we present our experiences using our image processing toolkit ChalkBoard and other video processing tools to post-process a pre-recorded conference talk. With inexpensive video cameras, video services like youtube.com and vimeo.com, and widely available and inexpensive video editing software, we expect this new media to be increasingly used as a mechanism to both promote research agendas and deliver technical content. In order to explore the use of such media in more detail, the Functional Programming group at KU recorded a technical talk and experimented with various post-processing tricks to enhance the value of the talk. Specifically, we fixed a common lensing issue in software, added small animations and pictures which matched the gestures of the actors, improved the visual quality of the slides being talked to, and experimented with a post-hoc zoom. Overall, the post-processing stage took considerably longer than anticipated, but did add perceivable value and impact to the final video.
  

We also had to work hard at making a LaTeX document look like a Word document.

Comments always welcome!

FPG@KU

Robbing Hood?

The Kansas Lava team have been looking into improving Haskell debugging tools in order to tackle more complex Lava circuits. As part of this effort, we dusted off Hood, a small post-mortem debugger developed for GHC 4.X at OGI in 1999. Hood has now been ported to GHC 6.X, and re-released on hackage. Watch this space for Hood extensions in the coming months.

Hood is based on the concept of observation of intermediate data structures, rather than the more traditional stepping and variable examination paradigm used by imperative language debuggers. It can observe base types (Int, Bool, Float, etc.), finite and infinite structures (lists, trees, arrays, etc.), functions, and monadic actions. Notably, Hood preserves the type and strictness properties of the functions under observation, meaning your program can be debugged without affecting its semantics. Best of all, Hood can be extended to observe custom data types with simple instance declarations.

You can find more information, including examples and a tutorial, on the new Hood webpage:

http://www.ittc.ku.edu/csdl/fpg/Hood

We hope you find it useful!
Andrew Farmer, Andy Gill