CSE at South by Southwest

U-M attended the 2016 South by Southwest festival in Austin, and CSE participated in showing off another round of innovative technologies.

South by Southwest began as a small film and music festival and has grown to become one of the biggest arts and technology fests in the country. Spanning two weeks and a half-dozen conferences in Austin, Texas, it brought together executives and creative types from industries ranging from tech to gaming to music to movies.

A number of undergraduate students represented CSE at the U-M exhibit hall booth. One booth, called Social Sensory Surfaces, focused on the work created by students in a software engineering class taught by CSE lecturer Dr. David Chesney and Professor of Architecture, Sean Ahlquist. The students created tactile coloring books to help children with autism spectrum disorder perceive how much pressure they are putting on objects.  A large screen of spring loaded fabric is stretched over a frame with a projector and a Microsoft Kinect placed behind it. The projector projects the image onto the screen and as the patient pushes in the screen is colored, meanwhile the Kinect sensor measures the depth of pressure that they’re applying to the screen changing the hue of the color they’re applying. The students that showcased this project were CS students Anna Dai, Si Long Tou, and architecture students Taylor Boes and Oliver Popadich.

CS students also attended the festival to showcase MHacks, the popular hackathon that takes place on U-M’s North Campus each semester. Since the first MHacks in February 2013, Michigan students have built the bi-annual event into a sophisticated operation that draws speakers, participative sponsors, and student participants with a variety of technical and non-technical backgrounds. The students that managed that booth were Vikram Rajagopalan, Pavithra Vetriselvan, and Varsha Tirukonda.

The other innovations representing U-M at SXSW were MCity, 3D Printing (UM Health and Biomedical Engineering), Concussion (NeuroTrauma Research Lab at the School of Kinesiology), Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Research at a Glance, Innovate Blue, and Tech Transfer.

Below are photos from the festival.