This graduate student video competition was for explaning my research to a non-technical audience. In one minute or less. That's not a lot of time to cover several years of work! Fortunately, I could get creative and pair what I was saying to something visual and active.

With a camera, some friends, Audacity, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe After Effects, I brought my stick figure storyboard to life. You can watch it on the McMaster School of Graduate Studies YouTube channel.

I was awarded first place for aesthetic poster design, and tied for second place in the People's Choice with my coworker Sasha Soraine. Overall, I won second place.

This is a poster competition for graduate students in the Department of Computing and Software to get experience with academic poster design and presentation.

I enjoyed the challenge of squeezing years of research into a small and visually appealing product. It also let me have some Photoshop fun!

I had three minutes and one static slide to convey my Ph.D. research. I had to communicate the problem and what I was doing about it to a panel of judges that were not familiar with my work or field. Needless to say, it was a challenge (and public speaking is one of my least favourite things to do).

I did it though, and am quite pleased with how I did. People were surprised that I could speak that loudly. That must have helped capture the attention of another student who came to work in our lab the following summer. They claim that it was my 3MT that interested them in it, and I can't think of a higher form of praise.

Since the focus is on what I wanted to say, I kept it simple and designed the slide in PowerPoint.

This was a fun, three-week design challenge. In teams of five, we designed a user experience and interface for a game targeted at high school students by creating personas and paper prototypes.