Feb 22, 2008 DIVA Group Meeting Sid Fels, Allison Lenters, Phoebe MacRae (and dog), Katie McAllister, Bob Pritchard, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, Adriano Vilela, Marguerite Witvoet, Ying Yin

Status of the program manager position:

	Interviews and investigations based on personal contacts have not resulted in an appropriate candidate. Sid and Bob will finalize the job posting and start distributing it this coming week. Bob will send out an email asking for suggested people and places that should receive the advertisement. As part of the discussion it was clarified that there are two components to the position, one managerial and one coding. A mention was also made of the need for a project timeline so that we can check which parts of the project are meeting bench marks on time.

Report from Allison on implementation of neural nets:

	Allison has implemented a single training version of an RBF network in Matlab. Adriano has a great deal of experience in this area so he, Sid and Allison will meet to coordinate an approach to the programming.

Report from Ying on interface code:

	Ying has programmed two Max/MSP objects for communicating with the Patriot. One polls and one uses streaming. The polling approach seems to update faster, but this may be an artifact of the screen redraws in Max. We will test this using the synthesizer.

Planning for Eric, Marguerite and Katie to start recording

	Bob has written and installed the data recording patch on the computer in Eric’s lab. Marguerite, Eric and Katie will begin work on Monday to test the setup and get camera angles and sound recording in place.

Status of CC funding and ORS

	Bob has still not received an account number from ORS so he’s not able to put contracts in place yet for Marguerite et al. He contacted ORS two days ago to ask for information about the status of the account.

Summer placements and duties/Summer schedules:

	Allison and Ying have been offered summer work on the project. Ying will need to discuss dates/times with Bob and Sid to avoid conflicts around graduation. Eric Foxhall will be joining the project as a co-op student for the summer.

Sound issues in MAGIC lab:

	There has been a concern raised about the amount of sound happening in the MAGIC lab. We will ensure that every workstation has headphones, and all of us should be aware that long discussions and meetings might be better held in the large lab. However, it should also be recognized that there are several sound experiments/projects happening on an on-going basis in the lab, and that is part of the environment.

Publication suggestions:

	Hélène has suggested submitting a paper proposal to the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers. Sid, Bob and Hélène will be discussing this over email for the next while. Everyone was encouraged to identify conferences, publications, and concert organizations where we could submit papers and proposals. Bob will send out an email reminding the group of this and asking for suggestions.

Wiki updates/suggestions:

	People were reminded to update the wiki when appropriate and to add new items if applicable.

Additional items:

	Eric mentioned that we need to have a “go-to” person for supplying cables, chips, etc. Sid thought we should be able to work this out through existing project personelle.
	Equipment funding for the robotic jaw project (parallel to the Visual Voice project) should be in place after today. Final signature is happening this afternoon.
	Eric noted that we require a raid array for data storage. After some discussion about the budget Sid suggested that an equipment grant request to NSERC might be the way to proceed. According to Sid the next deadline is in April.