Vids Samanta

Biography
	Vidyut Samanta (Vids) is a researcher at REMAP, the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, a joint program of UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television and Engineering and Applied Science. Vids has a MS in Computer Science (2005) and is currently pursuing his PhD. at the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA where he is working in the urban participatory sensing area. In his spare time, he enjoys wind-surfing, sky-diving, flying, kayaking and trekking.
Artworks
	Homer in Cyberspace Musical. Homer's Odyssey. Mel Shapiro. REMAP. Live Performance. Ogre 3D Game Engine. Python. Animation. 3D Graphics. Live Video. Virtual Sets. Masks. Multiple viewports. HD Projection. Different Surfaces.
	Juncture Los Angeles. Walt Disney Imagineering R&D. California State Parks. REMAP. Participatory. Public space. Media environment. Historical memory. Los Angeles River. Tragging. Trains. Traffic. Sensing. Video. Images. Sounds. SMS. Cultural identity.
	Monumneto 872 Cell phones. images. MMS. Tagging people. Discover history. Drawing maps of images.
	The Bloggers Project: Mel Shapiro. MFA actors. Internet research. Blogs. Iraq. The Iliad. REMAP Media production. Game design. Fluidity. Software design. Location-based entertainment. Artists and engineers. Hyper-disciplinary. Cool but not hip. Collage is the new montage.
	Optical Body: Until the advent of interaction, the moment of surprise or wonder that is Art has been limited to a perceptual/intellectual involvement. The advantage of interactive installations over other types of art (eg. a painting on the wall; the sculpture in the garden; or a static installation) is the degree of involvement of the physical body. Within this framework, the spectator becomes actor. We want to convey this simple notion by giving the visitor a specific visual and auditory response to his/her position in a space. And as more visitors enter the space of the installation this response becomes differential and specific in proportion to the number of visitors and their location. This piece was done with the UCLA Hypermedia Studio.
Research
	Urban Sensing Urban Sensing systems research is a collaboration between CENS and the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP) that seeks to develop cultural and technological approaches for using embedded and mobile sensing to invigorate public space and enhance civic life.
	REMAPPING LA: Cultural Civic Computing in Los Angeles
	Advanced Technology for Cinematography The purpose of this project is to research and develop a network sensor system that collects real time data, on a film set, which contains relevant information for the film production workflow.
	Analysis and Study of Short Message Service (SMS) This is a study of the Reliability of a Nationwide Short Message Service.
	MiniJava Project This is a framework for writing a compiler for MiniJava. It is now part of Modern Compiler Implementation in Java. I have also co-authored several chapters of this book, with Professor Jens Palsberg.
Software
	libExtractor: A library used to extract meta-data from files of arbitrary type. It is designed to use helper-libraries to perform the actual extraction, and to be trivially extendable by linking against external extractors for additional file types. Currently, it supports the formats HTML, PDF, PS, OLE2 (doc, xls, ppt), StarOffice, OpenOffice, MAN, DVI, MP3 (ID3v1, ID3v2), OGG, WAV, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, DEB, RPM, TAR(.GZ), ZIP, Real, QT, MPEG, RIFF (AVI), ASF, and ELF. Various additional MIME types are detected. For more information see the freshmeat project page.
	Java Tree Builder JTB is a syntax tree builder to be used with the Java Compiler Compiler (JavaCC) parser generator.and automatically generates a set of syntax tree classes based on the productions in the grammar, utilizing the Visitor design pattern, two interfaces, Visitor and GJVisitor, two depth-first visitors, DepthFirstVisitor and GJDepthFirst, whose default methods simply visit the children of the current node, and a JavaCC grammar jtb.out.jj with the proper annotations to build the syntax tree during parsing. New visitors, which subclass DepthFirstVisitor or GJDepthFirst, can override the default methods and perform various operations on and manipulate the generated syntax tree.

Publications
	Vidyut Samanta , Jason Ryder , Sona Chaudhuri , Jeff Burkey, Deborah Estrin , and Fabian Wagmister, ''UCLA/Cisco Metropolitan Wi-Fi Research Network``, IEEE LANMAN Workshop, June 2007. Xiaoqiao Meng, Petros Zerfos, Vidyut Samanta, Starsky H.Y. Wong, Songwu Lu ''Analysis of the Reliability of a Nationwide Short Message Service`` IEEE INFOCOM, May 2007. Petros Zerfos, Xiaoqiao Meng, Vidyut Samanta, Songwu Lu, ''A Study of the Short Message Service of a Nationwide Cellular Carrier`` Internet Measurement Conference, October 2006. Heemin Park, Jonathan Friedman, Pablo Gutierrez, Vidyut Samanta, Jeff Burke, Mani B. Srivastava ''Illumimote: Multi-Modal and High Fidelity Light Sensor Module for Wireless Sensor Networks`` IEEE Sensors Journal, September 2006. Heemin Park, Jonathan Friedman, Pablo Gutierrez, Vids Samanta, Jeff Burke, Mani B Srivastava, ''Illumimote: A High Performance Light Sensor Module for Wireless Sensor Networks,`` 2nd place in the 43rd DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest, July 2006. Vidyut Samanta, Ricardo Oliveira, Advait Dixit, Parixit Aghera, Petros Zerfos, Songwu Lu, ''Impact of Video Encoding Parameters on Dynamic Video Transcoding.`` Communication Systems Software and Middleware, January 2006. Heemin Park, Jonathan Friedman, Jeff Burke, Mani B Srivastava, Vids Samanta, "A New Light Sensing Module for Mica Motes," CENS ARR 2005, October 2005. Vidyut Samanta, ''A Study of Mobile Messaging Services.`` Master`s Thesis, September 2005. Book Chapters of Part I. Fundamentals of Compilation in Modern compiler implementation in Java. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Main author: Andrew W. Appel; co-authors: Jens Palsberg and Vidyut Samanta