Work | James Alvarez

Development of gaze contingent eye tracking psychophysics experiment for 4 month old infants with Eyelink, Psychtoolbox & MATLAB.
Solution to present user motion capture in real-time on a realistic avatar in 3D environment. Participants wear Oculus Rift headset and see their Kinect driven actions applied to 3D avatar in first / third person, for experiment on episodic memory.
Creation of three VR based games / tests for eye function (Unity3D & Oculus Rift) random object search, catch game (using Leap Motion hand position sensor) and time telling.
Scripted data analysis of >3000 participant cohort study on synesthesia and wellbeing in primary school children. Python notebooks to present insights to the team, collaborative exploration of data with machine learning.
Development of online / offline node webkit Javascript experiments to detect Synesthesia in children.
Movie player with custom shaders to rotate visual gamut in Macleod-Boynton colour space.
Creation of interactive 3D learning environment in Unity3D. The environment included several physics based / puzzle games with a child avatar helper. Eye tracker and SHORE facial expression recogniser were integrated for Autism research purposes. Included experience with 3D modelling / skinning / rigging. Involved interactive development via field testing with children in schools.
Collaborative work on GraFIX Eye tracking analysis software specifically in the areas of file management, cross-platform compatibility, batch processing, and optimisation of algorithms (C++).
Implemented fisher kernel learning algorithm (Machine learning) to analyse large eye movement database.
Tobii eye tracking Mex files for use by MATLAB programmers for childrens’ eye-tracking research.
Various eye tracking experiments written in MATLAB with Psychtoolbox.
Programming colour research experiments for children in MATLAB
Colour appearance modelling in MATLAB

Unity3D app to test for colour vision deficiency in children. Visual search game with colourful animated rewards. Accurate colour display managed between iPad models with shaders. GDPR compliant data gathering /analysis solution with Drupal and Firebase. Behaviour analysis with local linear fitting algorithm re-written in C++ with Armadillo matrix algebra library.
iPad app to test for colour vision accuracy and colour preferences in pre-industrial society in Ecuador. Unity3D based app, with similar data gathering solution to above.
‘Synestheatre’ iOS app, uses structure.io depth sensor, and iPhone dual cam to capture 3D depth data and affect real-time sound; a pleasant navigation aid for visually impaired. Parameters for depth and colour information to sound controllable with gestures and audio with CoreAudio - many customisable aspects through UI and JSON file to allow researchers to test efficacy of different setups. Flir One heat sensor support added in 2018.
Naviear - an Android application for Psychology field research Université Paris Descartes. The application converts motion sense events from hardware to real-time DSP. It also allowed the experimenters to send messages to users phones via SMS / Bluetooth, to schedule tasks / adjust parameters, the results of which were sent to the experimenter’s dropbox. Mostly written in Java, although due to the low latency sound requirement, the sound generation was written in C.
Unity3D app to collect colour preference data with german children with the Justus-Liebig-Universität.
Hearspace - an iOS application to turn compass information into input for ‘Pure Data’ sound patches.

React app for collecting synesthetes unique experience of colours in their perception of words.
Drupal / PHP / HTML5 development of psychology experiment building web platform. Experiments can be created with UI and advanced users can upload custom JS experiments. Results are stored with simple REST API and data is shared with other researchers via invite-only groups. Experiment flow works with other platforms e.g. Qualtrics, as well as conditional logic (e.g. to show different tests dependent on results). WYSIWYG input forms with conditional logic can be created using a custom TinyMCE plugin, to allow a more flexible full HTML alternative to off the shelf survey design platforms.
Experiment-hosting Drupal module redeployed in new site for misophonia research.
Moodle deployment on AWS EC2 instance, with plugin (PHP ) development for a complex dual participant recruitment problem.
Javascript development of or involvement with >100 custom web based experiments, on above platform, memory tasks / multimedia / reaction times etc. To date the platform has hosted >16,000 sessions with over >1,200,000 individual trials.
Web app for automatic analysis and presentation of ‘sociograms’ - network representations of childrens’ ratings of their peers - used to identify socially at risk children.
Ubuntu server administration for dedicated psychology survey web server. Set up SSL, MySQL, scheduled backups, emails and installed and configured PHP web application ‘Redcap’, to allow collection of data securely.

Interests

Skills

Software

Data skills

Institutions I have worked for

Past projects