Distributed Computing
In December I attended the holochain hackathon in Bristol. Holochain is a blockchain-like technology that enables novel distributed applications development. A lot of the weekend consisted of brainstorming and discussing the best use cases for the software, such as cryptocurrencies, support for homeless people and defence of intellectual property to name a few. My contribution was towards a voting app that could one day enable online voting and transform the electoral system.
Sensing and Actuating
In February 2015 I took part in an all Bulgarian team to tackle an engineering challenge posed by ARM - develop something cool using an mbed in 24 hours. The project we developed was a self-sustaining plant system. It was able to detect when the moisutre in the soil of a plant was low and automatically open a valve to release water. Additionally, it used a photocell to detect when the plant had not received enough daylight and would turn on an additional source of light. My team took the bronze medal and was congratulated on it's "green" initiative.
Human-Computer Interaction
"Marionette" is a haptic device I built during as a postgraduate research student. It was designed to explore touch perception limits between real and device induced 3D shapes. Its novelty resided in the support for 2D exploration over a flat surface and multi-finger capabilities. Marionette was able to apply inclination to four fingers with two degrees of freedom while the user moved the device as if it were a mouse.
And the rest....
