Kyriakos Tsoukalas

Virginia Tech | VT

This dissertation investigates the role of learners’ affect during instructional activities of visual and musical computing. More specifically, learners’ enjoyment, excitement, and motivation are measured before and after a computing activity offered in four distinct ways. The computing activities are based on a prototype instructional apparatus, w...

The NIME community has proposed a variety of interfaces that connect making music and education. This paper reviews current literature, proposes a method for developing educational NIMEs, and reflects on a way to manifest computational thinking through music computing. A case study is presented and discussed in which a programmable mechatronics edu...

Based on the expanding usage of smartphones as the platform for computer applications, this paper addresses the information asymmetry between personal and factual observations that inform a decision-making process. The purpose of this pa- per is to propose a model to help self-guided behavioral change based on collection of personal information. A...

The innovation in the new musical interfaces is largely driven by the ground up endeavors that introduce a level of redundancy. Inspired by the successes of iPhone and other industry innovations that were driven by iteration, consolidation, and scalability, we present a new interface for musical expression and discuss key elements of its implementa...

Per Kotter’s eight-step model for leading change, there is a need for a guiding coalition, which is a social network of agents for change. The proposed presentation discusses a computational approach to describing the potential of a network’s structural position for organizational influence. A simulation of an exemplary index capable of such analys...

Laptop orchestras create music, although digitally produced, in a collaborative live performance not unlike a traditional orchestra. The recent increase in interest and investment in this style of music creation has paved the way for novel methods for musicians to create and interact with music. To this end, a number of nontraditional instruments h...

The following paper introduces a new mechatronic NIME kit that uses new additions to the Pd-L2Ork visual programing environment and its K-12 learning module. It is designed to facilitate the creation of simple mechatronics systems for physical sound production in K-12 and production scenarios. The new set of objects builds on the existing support f...

This work presents a novel learning framework for instrumental utility of behavioral connectivity within dynamic social networks. The combination of active and Bayesian learning techniques enables the proposed algorithm to learn how to predict a likelihood of group-stages of cooperation, according to observable behavioral connectivity within a dyna...

This paper describes a workflow for composers, engineers and performers to collaborate, using Pure Data (PD) as a framework, towards the design of electroacoustic musical instruments intended for live performances of sound-based music. Furthermore, it presents some considerations about live performance and ideas of creating collaboration tools, pos...