Anas Maghfur

In 2012 the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality (VR) headset display, made headlines in the technology world when it raised US$2.5 million through crowdfunding. In 2014 it was acquired by Facebook for a whopping US$2 billion. Ever since then leaders in technology have been pouring money in VR research & development and there is no shortage of creative studios producing VR content. Although VR have not reached universal adoption, the data looks to be auspicious. In 2010, just 2 years prior to VR's supposed harbinger, I wrote a chapter in my Sufficiency in the Philosophy of Technology under Prof. John Sanbonmatsu titled 'The Ontology of Virtual Reality'. Rereading it, I think it is still relevant today. Here it is: There are two aspects of virtual reality that pertains to human use: information and communication (Valentine and Holloway n.d.). Virtual reality is a space filled with information provided by its architects. Perhaps the easiest example to grasp is the internet...

DigiBlox – The design and realization of Lego-esque blocks containing highly affordable microprocessors that when assembled communicate with each other to calculate and transmit their assembly configuration to a PC which will then render a representation of the assembled blocks in a virtual environment. The DigiBlox was motivated by the desire to promote a creative learning environment for children. With the DigiBlox, children will be able to build structures like they would with normal Legos and witness their creations come into existence in a virtual environment. They would then be able to perform experiments on their creations in the virtual environment that would otherwise be impractical should it be done in real life. For example, a group of children may build a bridge using the DigiBlox and may want to see if the bridge could withstand a dynamite explosion under it. Dynamites would be too dangerous for children to play with but in the virtual environment, where that bridge th...

Like many dramas, Antigone and The Celebration (originally realeased as  Festen in Denmark) tells the journey of the protagonist’s resistance to the antagonist's power. But what is the nature of this resistance to power and what is the basis of power in general? Among the many challenges that Christian and Antigone had to overcome, one of them was physical force. In both dramas, neither Helge nor Creon had to directly exert physical force on those who resisted them. Everything was done indirectly. Creon had influence over agents of the sovereign so all he needed to do was to issue some law or “proclamation” (Sophocles, line 34) and use his agents to physically enforce them. Just like Creon, Helge had influence over his guests and Michael in particular. In fact, Helge’s influence was so strong that Michael and a couple of the other guests forcefully removed Christian from the dinner party without needing Helge to instruct them first. They were quick to brush off Christian’s ...

The ASSISTment is a cognitive computer tutoring and reporting system targeted towards middle school math students under development in WPI's A.I. Lab with sponsorship from the US Department of Education. A new system was implemented in ASSISTments allowing questions of a particular type to be procedurally generated from a single question of that same type allowing the artificial tutor to utilize mastery learning in its pedagogy. Studies of the real-world impact of mastery learning in the ASSISTment system were conducted across middle schools in Massachusetts under controlled conditions. The resulting data did not show significant indicators that mastery learning in the ASSISTment is effective. However, case studies of certain test subjects suggest that mastery learning could be effective for certain kinds of students, specifically the low achieving ones, indicating that further work needs to be done on only these types of students. This is just the abstract of a 2009 r...

Who is the protagonist in Sophocles’ Antigone ? Is it Antigone or Creon? Scholars in literature often debate that question. But in Don Taylor’s 1984 rendition of Antigone , there is no doubt that Creon (played by John Shrapnel) is the protagonist. Don Taylor’s direction to have a Creon-focused Antigone was a precarious decision, but a highly successful one. You have to see it to believe it. The story of Antigone (played by Juliet Stevenson) is about the recalcitrant title character who buried her dead brother thereby violating a decree set forth by her uncle, the new king Creon. She did it to uphold a religious right she believed to be ubiquitous, but Creon viewed it as an act against his power and therefore refused to grant her impunity from death. Even the fact that she was his niece and future daughter-in-law could not have saved her nor did she want to be saved, at least not through family ties. After all, Antigone's iconoclastic action, her brother’s burial, was also ...

The Tangible Level Editor is a peripheral for a platformer-style game where the configuration of specially-designed blocks in the real world are mapped in the virtual world allowing players to create levels by arranging said blocks. It is a device designed and built by me, Elliot Brodzki and Richard Pianka during our undergraduate studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Motivation It was designed to be a tangible substitute to level creation using standard controllers. Typically a virtual world is created by an artist with a keyboard and mouse. Such peripheral devices do not resonate with very young users hence the interface itself is occluding a child's access to the creative potential of building virtual environments. Most children are acquainted with toy blocks at an early age so it makes sense that the interfaces should be design with the familiarity of toy blocks in mind. The Tangible Level Editor is this interface. Implementation The Tangible Level Editor is a p...

Here describes a design of a digital radio receiver for a multi-user transmitter with an error prone oscillator that functions in non-ideal transmission channels. The implementation is software-defined (i.e. no hardware other than an analog-to-digital converter) with Matlab simulations yielding deciphered messages that are fully comprehensible. It was designed by me and advised by Prof. Andrew Klein of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. What to expect of the signal clarity by the end of this article. Introduction The M6 radio receiver was designed to work in tandem with a transmitter with the specifications listed in the table below:  symbol source alphabet +1, +3   assigned intermediate frequency  210 MHz  nominal symbol period 121.6 nanoseconds  SRRC pulse shape rolloff f  β ∈ [0.1,0.3]  FDM user slot allotment 10.7 MHz   truncated width of SRRC pulse shape 8 transmitter clock periods  preamble sequen...