Daniel Burke

Image Source: Akai Website

Accessability Software for Music

For my senior major design experience project I took "Accessible Software Systems Design" with Dr. David Chesney. I am worked on a team with 3 other senior students to design a software for our client: Brad Ebenhoeh. In 2005 Brad had a cerebral hemorrhage after which he spent 7 months in the hospital and 10 years in rehab. As a result Brad now uses a motorized wheelchair, is paralyzed on the right-hand side of his body and left-hand side of his face, has Ataxia in the left-hand side of his body, and has visual difficulties as well. One thing Brad is very passionate about is music and playing the paino. The goal of our software is to add functionality to the Akai MPK Mini midi keyboard by repurposing some of the drum pads and incorperating a foot pedal so that it is much easier for Brad to execute certain actions, such as editing a music score and playing chords with two fingers. Our program is a web application written using HTML, Javascript, React.js and the Python Flask framework. Our program interfaces with the Flat.io embedded Javascript and REST API.

Link to Github repository.

• Organization: University of Michigan CSE Senior Design Project
• Date: January 2018 - April 2018
• Client: Brad Ebenhoeh

Image Source: ChilledCow lofi hip hop radio stream

Image Source: Google AI Beat Blender

Image Source: Google AI Melody Mixer

Lofi Hip-Hop Generator

One of my core passions is music, so for a side project I wanted to see how Machine Learning could be used in music generation. I decided to pursue the creation of a lofi hip hop generator, as I am a large fan and creator of lofi hip hop myself. If you are unfamiliar with lofi hip hop check out this popular lofi hip hop YouTube stream . Many popular lofi hip hop tracks are sample based piano tracks backed by repetative drum loops and is somewhat formulaic, so I wondered if a robot could generate a constant stream of lofi hip hop by learning from some popular piano samples. I am currently exploring the TensorFlow: Magenta MusicVAE interface, which utilizes deeplearn.js to generate melodies right in the browser.

Link to Github repository.

• Organization: Machine Learning and Music interest group (run by me)
• Date: March 2018 - Now

OBS Scripts

As part of my work study job as a Design Studio Intern one project I wanted to create was a template for the projector that could be used to display what interns are currently on shift, play videos when no events are going on, and show any general information. In order to display the interns currently on shift I wrote a script for Open Broadcast Software that uses the Google Calendar API to get the current events and display the name of the event and a associated picture. Supported scripting is a feature that was recently added to OBS, so I decided to make my script general and upload it to the OBS scripts page.This was so that other programmers writing scripts could look at the code and streamers can use it by downloading the API key and inputting their own calendar ID. It has been downloaded around 100 times since being released at the beginning of March. This has inspired further ideas for useful scripts for streaming that I plan to implement as soon as I find the time!

Link to OBS page for the script.

Link to Github repository.

• Date: February 2018 - Now

Path Planning Research

During the 12 weeks of summer between sophomore and junior year where I was not in Spain I did paid intern research for the Univerisity of Michigan EECS department under Professor Stephane Lafortune. Professor Lafortune partnered with Dr. Richard Hill of University of Detroit Mercy. I worked closely with Dr. Hill to continue his research project regarding abstracting path planning scenarios to cut down on calculation times so that planning could be calculated on the fly much more quickly. Our tests involved different numbers of robots, numerous start and end goals, and a different number of regions that only one robot could occupy at a time. My tasks over this summer included understanding the existing code base, making improvements to the basic robot movement algorithm, analyzing scenarios where the planning was slow using traditional methods and comparing these to abstracted scenarios. My final task was to program a controller to simulate parallel composition with the ability to construct a finite-state machine from various smaller finite-state machines and run Dijkstra's algorithm on the resulting graph, and then create documentation for the improvements made and a manual for running the code. In total these changes decreased the run-time of robot path planning scenarios by around half on average.

• Organization: University of Michigan EECS Department
• Dates: May 2016 - August 2016

Pirate ship model created by Kevin Boone and provided for free on his website

Blender 360 Video Pirate Project

One aspect of my job as a Design Lab Intern is to work on a personal project. For my project I decided that I wanted to learn Blender with the goal of creating a 360 degree animated video on a pirate ship. I have some fundamentals in 3D modeling from high school and animation experience from high school and Animation club at college as well, but this is my first time using Blender.

• Organization: Umich Digital Media Commons
• Dates: November 2017 - Present

Spain Study Abroad Travel Blog

This is my travel blog that I maintained while in Spain for 6 weeks, posting twice a week. This blog was sponsored and hosted by the International Programs in Engineering at University of Michigan, which is the department I got my International Minor for Engineers from.