Brandon Ellis
Hey you, thanks for stopping by my page. Kick your feet up, grab a cup of coffee, and learn a litle bit about me. For the best experience, view this site on a desktop. I'm an artist who really enjoys using technology to tell stories. I think my favorite part of storytelling is watching peoples' reaction when they experience something that seems like magic. My second favorite part of storytelling is coming up with these magical concepts and collaborating with the innovative minds to bring them to life. I'm fascinated by the concept of human to computer and often find myself flopping my arms around in the air trying to control my smart lights. Don't get me wrong, I have a great time thinking up news ways to control devices, but the majority of my time goes into AR/VR/MR exploration. What's my personal favorite of the alternate realites you ask? Augmented Reality, thank you for asking. The beauty in being able to overlay information in the real world, coupled with the idea that we can stream contextual information at super speeds, leads me to be nothing shy of excited for what comes in our future.
Portfolio
St. Jude Experience App
Celebrate the kids of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in a whole new way. Using Augmented Reality, you can bring St. Jude patient art to life, learn more about each of the patients, and discover how St. Jude is Finding Cures and Saving Children - because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.
Scholarship Manager
Scholarship Manager was an app that was created to help manage scholarships. In the app, you are able to input various bit of information regarding scholarship requirements, and manage the scholarships within the app. You are able to enter in your ACT score, GPA, letter of recommendations, and much more, and track which requirements you have yet to fulfill. Scholarship Manager will also notify you about upcoming deadlines regarding your scholarships. This app is a great tool to help organize all of your scholarship information into one place.
Memphis 200
The Memphis 200 app celebrates Memphis' Bicenntineal. With the theme of the bicenntineal being "Bring Your Soul", we sought to create an experience that engaged and informed the community. Users are able to navigate around Memphis to discover various St. Jude patient artworks. Once found, users are able to scan the image and watch it come to life, as well as learn about the artist and the building displaying the artwork.
St Jude. ART
The St. Jude ART app, or better put ARt app, showcasing the artwork of 8 patients from St. Jude, and allows users to experience the story of those patients, as well as watch the patient art come to life. Users are able to take pictures of the augmented experiences and share with family and friends.
Autonomous RC Car
ARC is an autonomous rc car that utilizes multiple sensors and behavior cloning to navigate through a track. The components of the ARC is a raspberry pi3, an ultrasonic sensor, a raspberry pi camera, and a handful of other parts to handle the connection and power between the raspberry pi 3 and the rc car. ARC utilizes a handful of libraries ranging from Tensorflow to RPIO.gpio to handle training our neural network and gauging the distance between the car and objects around it.
GeoVisualization
3D visualization of active Runescape players on our big blue planet using Touchdesigner.
Particle Attractor
Hand Controlled Cursor that pull particles to it. The model being controlled is being tracked by a KinectV2 and effects a simple particle system in real time.
Skeletal Tracking
Tracking human body pose using KinectV2 and maps sphere object to the human body joints output from our KinectV2. With these reference points, we can do some super fun things...like have a mini dance session in your room with cool effects.
Psychedelic
For this psychedelic look, we're streaming video from our KinectV2 and looking for edges in the frame. Once we have the edges highlighted, we add noise and color to those areas to achieve this look.
Pat Alpha Suite - Hololens
The Alpha Suite contains functionality for communicating with Pat. The suite contains components such as language translation, multilingual dialogue w/Pat, view stock information, voice and sms messaging, pizza ordering, online shopping, a calculator, a dictionary, and much more. (Video for remaining functionality coming soon)
Hololens Language Translation with Azure
The Microsoft Hololens is currently running an app that is connected to the Language Translation API. At the end of each recognized phrase, the device will send the phrase to the API endpoint and return the desired translated language.
ANNKart
Similar to the way ARC works, this ANN kart requires you to drive around the specified course before it is able to drive itself. While driving, the car is reading in multiple distances measurements; making sure to record how far the wall is, the angle, and the speed of the kart. After a successfully completing multiple laps, the returned values are used for our kart that we want to drive on its own. A neural network to accomplish this.
Perceptron
This is a visual example of how perceptron learning can lead to improved results over time. The character learns to walk around the platform, and improves based on the given rewards:how long it stayed on the platform, how far it walked, and whether it had fallen off the platform or not.
Pong
Basic implementation of pong that uses a neural network to play against the user.
Published Works
Creating a Personal ChatBot in Python3 using ChatterBot(Part1 - Setup)
Creating a Personal ChatBot in Python3 using ChatterBot(Part2 - Language Translation)
Creating a Personal ChatBot in Python3 using ChatterBot(Part3 - Language Understanding)
Creating a Personal ChatBot in Python3 using ChatterBot(Part4 - Voice Call, SMS, and Email)
Creating a Personal Chatbot in Python3 using ChatterBot(Part 5—Stock Information)
Connecting the Microsoft Hololens and Raspberry Pi3B+
Experience
Innovation - Experience Developer
Designed, developed, and documented multiple full scale Augmented & Virtual Reality experiences. Worked with small cross functional teams for rapid prototyping. Mobile and Mixed Reality Development(iOS, Android, Oculus, UWP, TouchDesigner)
Co-lead a collaboration with CodeCrew to teach Weekly classes of 15 middle/high school students through/by ALSAC. CodeCrew is a non-profit based in Memphis that mentors youth to be tech innovators and leaders. Through our collaboration, students are taught how to work in cross-functional teams, the importance of culture and collaboration, and a wide range of technical skills(Machine Learning, Virtual/Augmented Reality, and IoT). We are currently in our virtual 3rd year of the class. Host a weekly internal webshow called "Wednesday with Innovation" where we bring on guests and talk about how the organization is thinking out of the box and moving innovation forward. We have different segments within the show where we do book reviews, break down complicated technology terms into simply analogies, and enough Zoom filters to last through a global pandemic.Software Engineering Intern
Designed and developed a chatbot to aid in answering questions throughout the onboarding process. The chatbot handled general job and office related questions. You can ask the chatbot a question and have your question answered or be routed to where you need to be. The goal of the chatbot was to improve the ease of onboarding new employees, and to reduce the amount of distractions other employees might have when wanting to help their new coworker(s). Created documentation for working with IoT Edge devices and Microsoft Azure services. The documentation covered topics such as: Provisioning microcomputers and virtual machines as IoT Edge devices, connecting various sensors and processing telemetry data, and the storing and visualization of that processed data.
iOS Developer
Along with a group of 4 other college students, created a mobile application consulting business that generated over six figures in revenue. Worked directly with clients throughout the entire mobile application development lifecycle. Worked directly with designers and clients to implement key features in mobile applications. Handled both the front and backend development, as well as client consultations and follow up meetings.
Web Development Instructor
Responsible for developing lesson plans, establishing general classroom guidelines, and assessing a group of 75 middle and high school students. Taught students HTML, CSS, Bootstrap; allowing them to develop their websites throughout the entirety of the program.
Chapter Vice President & Advisor
Responsible for managing our recruitment commitee, fundraising committee, and student advocacy committee. Responsible for increasing membership, drafting grants for local and coporate sponsors, as well as leading programs to support educating youth through our BDPA Education Technology Foundation(BETF.org). Directly aided in bringing in over $60,000 in scholarships and grants to the chapter and its members.
Skills
- TouchDesigner
- Unity3D
- Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft Hololens Family & MixedRealityToolKit
- Oculus Family & VRTK
- Photoshop
- Technical Writing
- Drawing
- Tinkering with IoT Devices
- Running
- Ping Pong
- Reading
- Blender
- Babylon.js
- GANs
- Custom Interactions with Wacom Intuos
- Lightform
Interests
- Skydiving
- Germantown Half Marathon x3
- Completed 1000 entries in The Year 20 Philosophy(Talking to random folk about deep stuff)
- St Jude Memphis Marathon
- AWE2020 Speaker
- Start a business
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
- The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
- The Millionare Mind by Thomas J. Stanley
- Who Says You Can't? You Do by Daniel Chidiac
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
- Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
- The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- Find Your Why by Simon Sinkey, David Mead, Peter Docker
- The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer
- Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- Advice to Future Corpses(and Those Who Love Them) by Sallie Tisdale
- My Brief History by Stephen Hawking
- Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
- No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert A. Glover
- The Prosperity Paradox by Clayton M. Christensen
- The History of the Future by Blake J. Harris
- Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark
- The Road Ahead by Bill Gates
- The 5 AM Club: Your Morning, Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma
- Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson
- How To Write Your Destiny by Mark Manson
- What I Know For Sure by Oprah Winfrey
- The Path Made Clear: Discoverying Your Life's Direction and Purpose by Oprah Winfrey
- Red Rising : Pierce Brown
- Golden Son: Pierce Brown
- Morning Star: Pierce Brown
- Wow Brandon, two finished books? C'mon now.
Education
University of Memphis
Computer Science Major
Computational Chemistry Research Assistant
Black Data Processing Associates Memphis Chapter
Assocation for Computing Machinery
Habitat for Humanity
GiveCamp
CodeCrew
Black Girls Code
Tiger Volunteer Network
Emerging Leaders
Awards and Acknowledgements
Augmented World Expo(AWE) Speaker(2020)
SkyHigh Transportation and Mobility Accelerator(2019)
StartCo Transportation & Mobility Hackathon 1st Place(2019)
Oracle Scholar(2018)
Johnson & Johnson Scholar(2017)
1st Place - Start Co's 48 Hour Launch(2017)
2nd Place - National BDPA Mobile Application Showcase(2017)