Ananya Paul
I am a recent graduate with a Masters in Information Science from Cornell Tech who loves building. I love to take up an idea and nurture it to give it shape and momentum. Other than being a passionate technologist, I identify myself as a movement artist. I love incorporating diverse thinking into my work and create unique experiences and products.Scroll down to see a collection of my works.
Tech Cooking Class - Virtual Farm
Ferrero asked:
How might we use AR/VR to engage confectionary products consumers and educate them on the health impact, the ingredients and the sourcing of the raw materials?
Our solution is called "Tech Cooking Classes" and will bring cooking classes to the 21st century! What we envision is that participants will enter the cooking room and be transported to the kitchen of a top chef through 360° projection
screens. Then they will go through a virtual harvesting experience to understand the quality and sourcing of the products they will use in the recipe. Then they will be taught the recipe by the top chef projected on the screen and each
station will have an interactive display to guide them step by step through the recipe.
GyAR - Gym Augmented Reality
How can we educate beginners in the gym on how to use a gym equipment?
Our solution is called GyAR, an augmented reality mobile application that allows beginners in the gym to hover over workout equipment, and overlay a mannequin to demo how to use a new machine.
VR MakerLab
Interactive virtual reality experience simulating Cornell Tech Lab using Unity for HTC Vive Headset and
Controllers with 4 stations:
- Solar System Station - Modeled planets and sun with mass and size in ratio of real world values. Demonstrated laws of physics like rotation, revolution and centrifugal force via the solar system.
- Block Manager Station - Interactive guns which can be used to create blocks, delete blocks and move blocks in real-time. Demonstrate laws of gravity via falling blocks from mid-air.
- Weather Manager Station - Demonstrated weather of four cities and virtual weather components like cloud, rain, hail and snow.
- Super Mode station - Crazy stuff happening.
Digital Ghungroo
An electronic progrrammable anklet that chimes in the sound of your choice and lights up the way you like based on your feet movement in the 3D space.
Eleanor Roosevelt AR
Research project on Eleanor Roosevelt's political participation using dance and AR.
For this project, we chose to focus on the absence of
Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) at Four Freedoms Park (FFP) in
New York City, despite her active political participation
during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Our goal was
to communicate this participation using Augmented
Reality (AR) and the power of dance. We conducted
various forms of research in order to determine the
best way to approach this and found that an interactive
mobile AR app was the best way to do this so that each
user was able to have their own experience. Our
experimentation with AR also helped assess the
limitations of what can be implemented within this time
frame.
Metal Gear AI [Jazz & Metal]
Deep learning research to explore the task of generating instrumental music using two methods which have seen successful outcomes: LSTM (sequential RNN) and Transformer (attention RNN) architecture. We chose to play with Jazz and Metal genres
to train both the models for the AI to generate music in that genre.
Twitter bots in Indian politics
To understand how political information/misinformation and disinformation spreads so rapidly in the context of Indian politics, we scraped Twitter with certain hashtags to understand the correlation between events happening in India during the time period. We processed a massive amount of data in python and analysed the tweets as well as users to have discovered a good number of bots some from locations within India and some outside of the country that rapidly spread aggressive content to bring about communal divide.The article below discusses our findings in details and the methodologies we used to reach that conclusion.
Digital Nudge
Slackbot nudges to increase productivuty in class.
There have been many attempts to boost the productivity of students in a classroom setting. When approaching policy in education with a goal of increased productivity, standard policy suggests that incentives will optimize behavior. We
know, however, that incentives
applied to education do not have optimal results. Behavioral policy, on the other hand, suggests that people
show present bias leading to procrastination and inertia
to begin tasks. We aim to utilize behavioral policy in
the design of a Slack Bot that will push students toward
desirable behaviors to increase their productivity.
A Silicon Sycophants Replication Study
Are We Still Susceptible to Flattery from Computers in 2018?
In this replication experiment, we used the paper 'Silicon Sycophants: The Effects of Computers
that Flatter' co-authored by Fogg and Nass, to see if the effect of computer on humans is still the same 20 years later. The original paper poses the question of whether flattery coming from
computers has an effect on humans, and if yes, would the effects be similar to flattery coming
from humans. We replicated the experiment in today's technologically advanced setting and found interesting results.
Smart Erotics
Exploring Modern Sex Technology
Intimacy is one of the most basic needs for physical and emotional well being of human beings. Due to the complications of modern society like long distance relationships, different lifestyle choices we are often forced to satisfy our
needs of touch and warmth through artificial means. Though technology has touched and shaped our other aspects of life, technology for erotics is still lagging behind. In a world where designs are constantly evolving to be more human
centred, artificial sexual stimulation or accessory is still quite mechanic. This gap in the emotional needs for sex and the available solutions brings me to the topic of this article, where I discuss about the existing technologies for
enhancing human sexual experience.
Heuristic Evaluation and A/B Testing
We did a heuristic evaluation of the Kahoot based on usability.
Based on the heuristics, we also prototyped an alternate of Kahoots reports page and designed an A/B Testing for the original design and our prototype.