STEAM Factory co-founder and former Director of Collaborative Research, Arnab Nandi (Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering), discussed his interdisciplinary journey through creating interactive data platforms at the first annual RMC Interdisciplinary Methods Festival on Tuesday. The RMC Interdisciplinary Methods Festival was held in the 18th Avenue Library Research Commons from Monday, July 17 to Friday, July 21 and brought together students, staff, faculty and researchers to discuss and explore research methods.

Instead of explicitly talking about specific research methods as previous presenters had, Arnab discussed a novel approach that brought together different disciplines to solve a long-standing problem in computer science: creating ways to rank and recommend pairs in a data set.

When Arnab was looking at datasets, he found that just playing with the data was a better way to find insights that would otherwise take lots of code to find. Along with his team, he used this idea to begin the GestureDB project, which is focused on gesture-driven data exploration. With this project, Arnab and his team were able to use multitouch interaction to allow people to express complex queries in data sets.

The project was presented at the 400 W. Rich farmer’s market in January 2013, which was the STEAM Factory’s very first event. Arnab stressed the importance of validating projects in spaces outside of a researcher’s comfort zone, which can allow researchers to come up with insights they otherwise would not have discovered.

Eventually, Arnab’s work led to a collaborative art and technology project with faculty at ACCAD and the University Libraries, "The Invisible Library", that was hosted in the Thompson Library in 2014. They used real-time data on the readership of the University Libraries’ online journals in various subjects, such as business and philosophy, to create an interactive bar graph. However, instead of being a traditional bar graph, the bars were represented by trees that would grow as readership in different subjects grew throughout the time period data was being collected. Visitors could use gesture controls to play with the data and get more information on the different aspects of the data set.

Although many may see gesture control as a next-generation technology concept, Arnab proves it is already being utilized in a multitude of ways. In the past several years, Arnab and his team have been able to create data infrastructure that will support the growing number of gesture controlled technologies becoming available. As is demonstrated by applications from e-textbooks to art projects, Arnab’s research is paving the way for gesture-controlled technology to revolutionize the way people interact with computers.

For more information on Arnab’s work and the GestureDB project, visit arnab.org.