aamir virani

Projects

Random projects:

Angel Suggestions – built using Ruby on Rails – originally released 10/30/2008: Angel Suggestions takes data on people, companies, and investing groups to from CrunchBase to determine the angels you may want to talk to for your own ideas. It was a small project I did to learn more about command-line Ruby programming and scripting and modeling using decision trees, a machine-learning algorithm that does the desired prediction (which angel?) by looking at your answers to three questions: your category, round, and amount.
Blister – built using Ruby on Rails – originally released 12/31/2006: Blister is a social weblisting application. The basic idea of a to-do list online has been done many times (see Remember The Milk for a great implementation), but no current application focuses on how your friends and others can help you to get things done.

Prostate Detection: Winter 2005 Stanford CS229 Course Project. I used machine learning techniques (mainly principal component analysis (PCA)) to detect tissue anomalies in CT scans of the prostate.
Dystonia Research: Winter/Spring 2005 Stanford EE373A/B Course Project (with Brian Percival and Dr. Bernard Widrow). Done in conjunction with Dr. Terry Sanger’s research group at Stanford Medical Center. Dystonia is a neurological disorder characterized by random twitching, so our project tried to detect and smooth out movement patterns of a person as he/she tracked a dot moving on a touch screen.

The Freeze Tag Player: Rice University Senior Capstone Project (with JP Slavinsky, Nipul Bharani). We created a new gaming concept, a robot (a remote control car chassis) that could chase around little kids and play freeze tag. We implemented the gaming system by using beacons to do localization and proximity detection as well as tracking and motion prediction of a moving object (both the freeze-tag robot and a child wearing a transceiver).
ARSe Instruction Scheduler – 2000 Rice/AMD VLSI Design Contest Second Place: Fall 2000/Spring 2001 Rice ELEC422/423 Course Project (with Sara MacAlpine, Robert Morton). We came up with a simple instruction set and instruction optimization scheme, and implemented it in silicon. When the chips came back, we tested and verified that it worked correctly.
eRaj MP3 Alarm Clock – 2001 Rice University Best Senior Design Project: Spring 2001 Rice ELEC424 Course Project (with Seth Eatinger, JP Slavinsky, Ray Wagner). We conceptualized an alarm clock that could play MP3s using a 16MB SD card, determined the necessary parts to build it, and did layout for a circuit board bringing it all together.
Music Compression: Spring 2001 Rice ELEC430 Course Project (with Alex Chen, Nader Shehad, Erik Welsh). We used signal processing and compression techniques as well as research on human hearing to create a new audio compression scheme.
Speaker Verification: Spring 1999 Rice ELEC301 Course Project (with Nipul Bharani, Sara MacAlpine, JP Slavinsky). We developed a simple scheme that performed time-scaling, frequency-scaling, and training to identify and verify speakers.