My name is Cody Narber and I am a doctoral student at George Mason University. I am working on the proposal stage at the moment, with a focus on Pattern Recognition and Human Computer Interaction. I have received my Master's of Science in Computer Science in May of '08 at Kansas State University.
I graduated in the Spring of '06 with two bachelor degrees from Bloomsburg University, one in Mathematics and the other in Computer Science. While there I worked for the department as a tutor for both subjects.
During my time at K-State I was the TA (Teaching Assistant) for CIS 111: The Fundementals of Java Programming. I graded assignments and tests, prepared and gave lectures on Fridays, and also held office hours. My Office was in Nichols Hall (shown to the left) and was pretty much my place of residence while at KSU (spent much more time in that building than my apartment). My Master's Thesis, which was on Emotional State Detection through Vocal Data, is available online through K-State.
So far here at George Mason, I have been a TA for CS 112: The Foundations of Programming during my first year of doctoral program. I have taken and passed my qualifying exams, completed the required coursework, and am now working on my proposal for my thesis (well doing background reading, and trying to get my thoughts organized). I have this past year been working in the Laboratory for the Study and Simulation of Human Movement, working with Haptic devices
Other than school work, I have a broad range of interests. Since my work has me mainly sitting in front of a computer for several hours at an end, I like to get away from the computer for a while. I enjoy working with my hands on different kinds of crafts (those that are not time sensitive). Crafts like origami, jewelry making, and paper engineering are ones I enjoy doing to relax while listening to music. I also enjoy cooking and trying new/unique recipes.
My primary outlet, however, is through origami, which I have been doing since I was about 10 years old. I began to design my own models during my 3rd year as an undergraduate. You can check out some of my work in the Designs sub-page under the Origami Header.
I like most people also enjoy movies and music. My music choice is of film scores, meaning the orchestral stuff that is added to movies to enhance the emotion that the movie is trying to evoke. Composers like John Williams, Basil Poledouris, and Jerry Goldsmith are my favorites. I sometimes enjoy watching television, but the commercials really turn me off and I end up doing something else. If I were to watch TV I would watch Fringe, or Dexter.
I also enjoy reading comics, but due to being in school and enjoying a vast variety of things, I do not follow too many monthly series at the moment. I primarily follow Green Lantern, as he has been a favorite of mine for a while and what Geoff Johns is doing right now is pretty great.
Below is my current resumé in pdf format (as of 08-26-2008):
Below contains programs, links, and descriptions of my past and present research:
I am currently investigating the quality of speech recognizers under stressed states (emotion, work load, G-Force, lombard effect, etc). I am doing this using commercial speech recognition software as well as open source software. I am also looking to improve accuracy using the open source recognizers.
I am also going to begin examining detecting and recognizing human gestures through video. This being hand gestures or human movement (Sign Language, Dance, etc.).
During my last year at Kansas, I participated in their Open House on April 19th and presented a bit of my work with audio processing. I did not present any material on my emotional research, but mearly the basics of processing audio and the background of the physics, engineering, and phonology that are used in gathering, extracting, and analyzing frequencies. Below is a program that was used to display the frequencies of audio that is streaming from themicrophone. Also are some slides discussing the background information mentioned above. Note that the program was written in C#, so it only can be executed on a windows machine that has the .Net framework installed.
My Masters Thesis dealt with emotion in voice. I attempted to analyze infrasonic (sound that is below the human hearing frequency) voiced audio samples to detect changes that may be caused by emotion. I wrote a program that automates the collection process, where the subject was asked to say a specific phrase ("I have applesauce for dessert") in 4 different ways (neutral, happy, angry, and sad). They were required to wear a throat microphone as it captures these lower frequencies, and has great noise cancellation. The entire process took 5-10 minutes, depending on how many times the subject rerecorded a specific emotional phrase.
I analyzed the samples using several pattern recognition techniques on the extracted features. I was disappointed by the results due to the lack of participants. This work indicated that infrasonic sound could be used to help identify the emotional context of a speech segment. There is much mork to be done in this area, and is something that I would like to return to someday.