We have a couple of changes from the standard game, however:

• Humans never win. No, really, the game is designed this way.
• We have a set of missions, that really comprise the core of the game. At each “mission”, which takes place every other day, the human and zombie teams need to work to accomplish some goal, and are rewarded accordingly. The one exception is the final mission on the last day, which is specifically designed to be next to impossible (which is why humans never win).

These changes have really made the game awesome; in particular, I’ve learned more about the CWRU campus than I would have learned any other way.

For my fifth and final game of HvZ, I’ve offered to help the core administration team run the game. For the most part this means taking photos. I did some photos of the last two missions last semester, which have been posted to Flickr. It’s a lot of fun, and hopefully this year will be successful!

PS: I know this is a day later than I said before, and I know it’s not the kind of technical talk many of you were probably expecting, but rest assured there will be technical bits coming; I just wanted to start off this weekly thing with something a little lighter in content.

I’m going to try a new direction for this blog. Previously I’ve always done things as I’ve found them interesting to talk about, but I’m going to start following a schedule, because obviously what I’ve been doing before hasn’t worked out so well.

Topics I’ll be possibly covering:

• My development projects such as Instalog and pevFind
• News regarding malware infection and the spread thereof, similar to the forum I volunteer for, BleepingComputer.com/
• Interesting problems I see in class (for the remainder of my time here at Case Western)
• Anything I’m allowed to talk about from inside Malwarebytes or Microsoft.
• Microsoft offers for free stuff passed to me from time to time.
• Photography

If there’s anything anybody wants me to cover, please feel free to let me know, and I’ll add it to my queue of things to do. Thanks!

So, starting tomorrow, expect a new blog post every Friday posted here! (Kick my butt if it doesn’t happen!)

Team members Raees Rahim, Jasmine Farley, and Donald Modeste see their system as a means of generally improving quality of life. Given education’s positive correlation with happiness and quality of life, they set out to remove barriers to education, starting with student motivation. By allowing students to communicate their feelings about a class, such as whether or not it is “boring”, they hope teachers can respond to student concerns quickly.

If you think Codec has a good idea, be sure to vote for them in the people’s choice awards.

The team has also produced a Windows Phone 7 application that they’ll be demoing at this year’s World Finals in New York. While there are several similar applications already in place in the US and Europe, such applications are uncommon in MiGi’s home, Vietnam. They hope to drive adoption of theirs and similar sites to reduce environmental damage, attacking the Environmental Sustainability Millennium Development Goal.

This has several practical implications. For the sake of example, consider a robot used for search and rescue operations after a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or tornado. Such machines are typically controlled by a human operator, who looks at images radioed back from cameras mounted on the robot, and radios commands to the robot’s motors to control it’s direction. That system works great — until the robot goes under a piece of rubble and loses contact with the operator’s transmitter. If that happens, currently someone would have to go into the potentially dangerous situation (e.g. why the robot was deployed in the first place) to retrieve the machine, as well as carry out its original task. The technology inside autoRobot would allow such a search and rescue robot to continue autonomously, attempting to find it’s controlling radio signal once more. This is both safer and cheaper than attempting to retrieve the machine manually.

Another case would be for severely disabled people, who use nontraditional means of controlling electric wheelchairs. Such means often work based on subtle motions of the disabled person, such as an eyebrow twitch. Unfortunately, such systems aren’t able to react quickly — if the disabled person sees an obstacle they might not be able to correct the chair’s motion quickly enough. The technology that powers Endeavor_Design’s prototype would be able to step in and avoid collision with obstacles.

Finally, such a system could be used for drivers asleep at the wheel. Fatigue is a contributing factor in several accidents, and the technology for detecting a sleeping driver is already relatively commonplace. What is lacking, however, is a system which tells the car what to do after it has detected that the driver is asleep. autoRobot‘s internals could be used to prevent collisions with other vehicles, potentially saving the lives of those in the car.

autoRobot uses machine learning algorithms similar to those recently deployed in Microsoft’s Kinect sensor. Rather than attempt to solve the exact answer as is done in traditional algorithms, machine learning systems are “trained”, as a baby would be, using large amounts of sample data. Once enough data is collected, these algorithms “learn” to avoid entering situations where a collision would be likely.

The team has constructed a prototype robot using their machine learning technology, and produced a series of visualizations showcasing a room containing several robots using this technology. At both similar and dissimilar speeds, each robot independently learns to avoid collisions with the walls of the room, and with other robots it encounters. Note how early on (the P1 videos), the robots collide with walls, and with each other, but as the algorithm learns, the machines successfully avoid collisions on a regular basis (in the P2 videos).

Endeavor_Design’s autoRobot has huge potential for generally making the world a safer place. If you think Endeavor_Design has an awesome idea, please vote for them in the Imagine Cup People’s Choice Awards!

First up is team IC Squared, from Ithaca College, New York. Named after their school’s initials and Imagine Cup itself, IC Squared has developed an HTML 5 application entitled Embryonic in the Web Game Design category.

Screenshot of Embryonic - Used with permission of Team ICSquared

In Embryonic, the player plays the role of a doctor controlling tiny nanomachines. These nanomachines  weave their way through the feminine reproductive system over the course of a pregnancy. The game covers the entire gestation process, with challenges ranging from ecotopic pregnancy (where the egg gets stuck), to maintaining nutrition and toxicity levels as the fetus grows and matures. Several of the worst health problems that affect pregnancy are preventable, and Embryonic gets people thinking about lesser known but still important maternal problems. By teaching players about health of developing children, Embryonic attacks the Maternal Health Millennium Development Goal, earning the game it’s place as a world finalist game design. If you think Embryonic is a good idea, be sure to vote for Embryonic in the Imagine Cup’s people’s choice awards.

Team ICSquared officially consists of four people:

• Corey Jeffers
• Ashley Alicia
• Marc Howard
• Evan Marinaro

However, ICSquared is the product of a larger game design club at Ithaca College. That body was created as an outlet for former members of Ithaca’s game design major. A few years ago, the college decided to dissolve it’s game design program, leaving those students who had chosen that path out in the cold. In response, Corey, Ashley, and a few others created the game design club, while academically migrating into other major programs, such as computer science or film. Today, that club consists of roughly twelve active members, with several more members getting involved on an intermittent basis.

The four first created Embryonic as an entry for the We <3 Games competition at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They had never written an HTML 5 game before, and were told they had to construct something in 48 hours matching the Imagine Cup theme. They taught themselves HTML 5, and produced the first version of Embryonic. In 48 hours. For that 48 hours of design, this team took home first place for their first attempt at an HTML 5 video game.

Of course, the team has made improvements to the game since that first competition. They entered an improved design for the Imagine Cup competition itself, and have reached the level of world finalists. They’ll be giving demos to judges and squaring off against other designs at this year’s Imagine Cup World Finals in New York. Let’s wish them luck!

The biggest confusion I see about the Imagine Cup is that people assume it is a programming contest. It is not. A typical programming contest takes a bunch of people, puts them in a room, gives them an interesting programming problem, and chooses the best implementation that solves that problem. It’s solely a test to see how well someone can write code. Imagine Cup is different. It’s not about code, it’s about ideas. That is, technical ideas which help solve the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations (i.e. End Poverty and Hunger, Universal Education, Gender Equality, Child Health, Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Environmental Sustainability, and Global Partnership). This competition doesn’t care how well you can write software. Rather, it cares about solving the world’s problems and the solutions that the competing students and teams generate.

The second thing to note about the Imagine Cup is that it is a “federation of competitions”. It’s not a one-shot deal. Each category is a completely separate competition with completely different rules. There are a ton of categories, such as general Software Design, Game Design for Windows Phone, Game Design for XBox/PC, etc. There are also a set of “challenges” — which are similar to the normal categorical competitions but which generally are less “big” in terms of the number or students involved. There’s also no rigid hierarchical structure, e.g. “first you start at the regional level, then you go to the national level, then you go to the world level, and so on….”. Each competition defines its own leveling system depending on the number of competitors, different participating countries, and other such things.

For example, the Software Design competition has a stipulation that the top team of the US Finals automatically gets entered into the running for the World competition. But the Game Design categories have no such stipulations.

Competitors first come up with an idea that fits their category, and works towards one of the Millennium Goals. They implement a prototype or demo which shows that idea as best they can to a panel of judges. The judges then rank the teams based on the presentations. There is not a prescribed set of criteria for the judges to look for — they choose the teams with the best ideas, and the best execution of those ideas.

US finals judges (lower left) frantically taking notes after the completion of a team's pitch

And… that’s about it. It seems complicated because of the massive number of categories, but the competition — and its goal are simple: get students solving the world’s toughest problems, and let them win fabulous prizes doing it.

So I went up to a gas station and convenience store which was located in the area of the bus stop, and tried to get a cash advance on my (well, really, Dad’s) credit card. That didn’t work because it asked for a PIN I didn’t have (this card had never been setup to give cash advances), so I thought I was stuck. Luckily, there was someone in the store buying things, and I offered to pay for her groceries if she would give me three dollars in cash (the fare to get back across the bridge). The woman was very nice, however, and stopped me from paying at the last minute, and just gave me the three dollars. (Whoever you are, if this post ever finds you, THANK YOU!)

I went back down the stairs to where the place to wait for the bus was, only to find that traffic was backed up on the bridge for miles. Another bus eventually did come, and was completely packed. I was one of only three people who were able to get on — the thing literally had no space left. Bus started moving — and then instantly was stuck in the same traffic jam. Talked to the driver (I was shoved all the way into the front of the bus because it was so full) and he said that the reason for all the traffic was a broken down bus somewhere on the floating bridge itself.

When we did get to the point where we passed that bus, it turns out that IT WAS THE SAME BUS THAT TURNED ME AWAY FOR TRYING TO USE A TRANSFER TICKET! I could not have been more lucky for actually NOT being able to get on. It wasn’t a nice and easy.

From that point on it was relatively smooth sailing. Got to the overlake transit center, and walked to my new “home”, building 27. Work itself so far has actually been uneventful — just installing things and getting a build environment setup. They gave me my own office, a pair of 24″ TN panels, and a Dell Precision T5400 workstation to play with — the fastest dev box I’ve ever used. Awesome time so far meeting people on my team and getting started on… well, what I’ve been getting started on .

Static Analysis Tools

Visual Studio vNext will have several static analysis tools for C++ projects. The static analysis tools check for things which aren’t compile errors, but cause undefined behavior or will fail at runtime. There’s an entire new UI in that one uses in order to see what the static analyzer reports, and the tool explains line by line why it thinks something is bad, with full source code highlighting and human readable explanations.

Feature Parity of the VS 2010 Architecture Tools for C++ Projects

All of the existing architecture tools in Visual Studio 2010, such as layering diagrams, dependency diagrams, etc. will be available for native code. C++ features such as free functions which have no managed equivelents will be supported,

Native Unit Testing Framework

Visual Studio vNext will include a native unit testing framework, based on Microsoft’s internal unit testing tools. All of the features Visual Studio will have for testing, including code coverage and the new features such as the Unit Test Explorer, will be available for C++. Additionally, all of the Team System features for testing will be supported, such as gated checkins, team builds and tests with coverage, etc.

It’s awesome to see that Visual Studio will finally be supporting C++ as a first class citizen in more ways than the compiler. Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs in the world (if not THE best), and now that I can actually use it for my own code, it’ll be much more useful. Awesome!

To use the problem step recorder, simply ask your user you’re working with to open the start menu and type in “psr” and hit enter. The user is presented with this screen:

Problem Step Recorder

The user pushes start record, and the tool will track everything the user does until they press stop record. It will then bundle this whole thing up into a ZIP file, which can be sent over an email or via a forum attachment. The IT support person can then figure out what’s going on with the end user without having physical access to the user’s computer.

PSR is in the box and available inside all versions of Windows 7. Enjoy!