Mind Media -- February 2015
Summary: I was accepted to the Stanford hackathon, TreeHacks, and over the course of 24 hours, my team of four constructed the MediaMind system. The idea was to take the Internet of Things to a futuristic extreme to get rid of the question “what do I feel like listening to?”, instead producing a curated list of songs before you even necessarily know what you feel. We used the Emotiv (left), a device that can read brain waves to determine emotions. From there, we connected the Emotiv’s reading through the cloud (using Microsoft Azure), which picked a selection of songs through the Spotify API (and ideally in the future, tv shows and movies, etc.) and sent that list to the Pebble (through the user’s phone). Then, one could select the media with the Pebble and, with wireless speakers for example, play the song immediately. I personally worked on sending the Emotiv’s readings to the cloud, which was actually one of the major difficulties since at the time the Emotiv only had one working API and could not send data wirelessly. However, I was able to complete this task. We were not able to get the full pipeline working in time, but were my team not split between me at MIT and the rest at Stanford, we would have really liked to continue the work. What I Learned: using cloud services (in this case, Microsoft Azure), working with competing teams to get the Emotiv to work, creating multi-element Internet of Things systems, and project managing (as a sudden headfirst dive). Documentation: code, hackathon submission