Scientific discovery is often portrayed as a purely rational process, yet personal writing of scientists frequently reveal rich emotional narratives interwoven with their intellectual journeys. We present Scientific Crosstalk, a computational framework leveraging topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and similarity metrics that allows to explore the alignment between emotional expression in personal correspondences and formal scientific publications. Using a curated corpus of Albert Einstein’s personal letters and research papers, we apply transformer-based sentiment classifiers and BERTopic to extract topic-specific sentiment distributions. Cosine similarity and Jaccard index measures are used to quantify emotional alignment across matched thematic regions. To visualize these dynamics over time, we construct a temporal knowledge graph linking emotional states to stages of scientific development. Our preliminary results reveal measurable emotional correspondences during key periods of discovery, suggesting that affective language in informal texts may reflect or even anticipate formal scientific reasoning. Our work offers a novel methodological contribution to affective computing, science-of-science studies, and interdisciplinary application of machine-learning techniques, opening new directions for analyzing cognitive and emotional processes that shape innovation.

A behemoth painting measuring 49 feet high and 358 feet in length, the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama exhibits opened to the public at the Atlanta History Center on February 22, 2019, fully restored to its original form as painted by the artists of the American Panorama Company in the 1880s. The Cyclorama is an immersive experience depicting the battlefield at approximately 4:45 p.m., July 22, 1864. The goal of our application is to enable easy identification and illustration of significant points-of-interests (POIs) embedded in the painting as the artists originally intended without obscuring the illusion of hovering above the battle field from an abstract perspective. This work in progress paper details a novel approach to develop an Augmented Reality (AR) experience at scale to incorporate real-world museum exhibits to treat as AR markers as a whole. It also describes the enduring process of keeping a low footprint on hardware configuration to maximize accessibility and thus empowering public scholarship in the field.

We propose to demonstrate a ubiquitous immersive virtual reality system that is highly scalable and accessible to a larger audience. With the advent of handheld and wearable devices, we have seen it gain considerable popularity among the common masses. We present a practical design of such a system that offers the core affordances of immersive virtual reality in a portable and untethered configuration. In addition, we have developed an extensive immersive virtual experience that involves engaging users visually and aurally. This is an effort towards integrating VR into the space and time of user workflows.

Novel approaches are needed to reduce the high rates of childhood obesity in the developed world. While multifactorial in cause, a major factor is an increasingly sedentary lifestyle of children. Our research shows that a mixed reality system that is of interest to children can be a powerful motivator of healthy activity. We designed and constructed a mixed reality system that allowed children to exercise, play with, and train a virtual pet using their own physical activity as input. The health, happiness, and intelligence of each virtual pet grew as its associated child owner exercised more, reached goals, and interacted with their pet. We report results of a research study involving 61 children from a local summer camp that shows a large increase in recorded and observed activity, alongside observational evidence that the virtual pet was responsible for that change. These results, and the ease at which the system integrated into the camp environment, demonstrate the practical potential to impact the exercise behaviors of children with mixed reality.

We propose to demonstrate a ubiquitous immersive virtual reality system that is highly scalable and accessible to a larger audience. Latest trends in mobile communications as well as the entertainment industry seem to validate that, accessibility and scalability play an important role in democratizing technology. We present a practical design of such a system that offers the core affordances of immersive virtual reality in a portable and untethered configuration. In addition, we have developed an extensive immersive virtual experience that involves engaging users visually and aurally. This is an effort towards integrating VR into the space and time of user workflows.

We introduce a new paradigm of collaborative computing called the Ubiquitous Collaborative Activity Virtual Environment (UCAVE). UCAVEs are portable immersive virtual environments that leverage mobile communication platforms, motion trackers and displays to facilitate ad-hoc virtual collaboration. We discuss design criteria and research challenges for UCAVEs, as well as a prototype hardware configuration that enables UCAVE interactions using modern smart phones and head mounted displays.