Columbia Engineers Win Recognition and Prizes at NYC Media Lab Demo Showcase

Columbia engineers brought back glory and grant money from the NYC Media Lab.

Oct 19 2016 | By Jesse Adams

Columbia engineers brought back glory and grant money from the NYC Media Lab’s annual summit and demo showcase, where more than 100 engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, and scientists presented research and prototypes to industry leaders in digital media and communications technology. Projects demonstrating the creativity and potential impact of ideas emerging from New York City universities competed for $25,000 in prizes at the September 22 gathering.

Others earning honorable mention and $500 prizes included Double-Talk, a full-duplex wireless technology enabling radios that can simultaneously transmit and receive on the same frequency from Professors Harish Krishnaswamy and Gil Zussman and their groups, and Vector Scan, a visual identification system that uses cloud-based servers to help detect potential mosquito breeding grounds, from researchers working with Professor Xiaofan (Fred) Jiang.Professor Steven Feiner’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab brought home second prize and $2,000 for a technology that subtly and automatically modifies users’ views when wearing a lightweight head-worn virtual reality display to decrease virtual VR sickness. Another innovation from Feiner’s lab, 3D Task Assistance, won honorable mention and $500 for utilizing an efficient new technique to create interactive visualizations helping users of monocular eyewear manipulate 3D objects.

Two other Columbia teams won honorable mention and prizes: Debate in (E)motion, a project from researchers in Computer Science and at the Data Science Institute, that analyzes facial expressions and sentiments in video—specifically of a debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—and provides natural language processing of the transcribed text; and Scopio, an image search engine and licensing platform for trending photos and videos on social media from a team linked to the Business School and the School of International and Public Affairs.

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