• Undergrad
• Cary Club (too many great memories to all call out, but definitely being apart of the first Rock the Quad was awesome - especially seeing it continue as an outstandingoustanding tradition with WEtheKings this past spring).
  
• Emily Mauzy Emerging Leaders Program (Bridget Golden - thank you for all the support my freshman year, you've been missed ever since your family moved to Vanderbilt)
  
• WCCR (oh, "Frankie G and the Mafia" was an awesome show, thanks Christian Hall and Billy Castrodale)
  
• Purdue Student Government (thanks Will Delozier)
• Purdue Admissions Office Tour Guides (I'm still can walk backwards)
  
• ACM SIGGRAPH at Purdue
• Purdue Athletic Promotions and Advertising (hey - being a freshman and getting to be on the football field and basketball court during games was awesome)
• Disney College Program (definitely the best summer of my life and a vast amount of great memories)
• ITaP Student Advisory Council (funny how back in 2005 we wanted to get rid of the Purdue Webmail and still in 2010 they are talking about getting rid of it... oh Purdue)
• Disney College Program Campus Representative (Alana Partridge - you were awesome to have worked with!)
  
• Belle of Louisville Marketing Internship
• Resident Assistant at Cary Quadrangle (I've enjoyed seeing my former residents go on and be successful at Purdue)
• Bank of America (my first look at the cubical life in corporate-America)
  
• Staff Resident at Cary Quadrangle (definitely my favorite of all my memories - lots of valuable lessons learned - don't play card games with staff during trainings, ha ha; Thanks to my all my former staff members and to Bob Brophy; funny how you can be accused of being a "ring leader of a coup" when you try to bring an issue to the attention of administrators)
  
• F9IB (ha ha, good times & long story)
• Mortar Board (a fun group of student leaders to have had the honor to work with)
  
• Iron Key (definitely my second favorite of all my memories - go team PTC!)
• College of Technology Undergraduate Student Grade-Appeal Committee (it's amazing how an appeal system can be corrupt - very long story)
  
• Adobe Lighthouse Program & attending Adobe MAX conferences (cold calls can certainly pay off)
• myPurdue Portal Advisory Committee (they ask for a CGT student who has studied user-interface design to serve on the committee but they were too afraid to make changes to the out-of-the-box system to improve the UI, oh well)
  
• Graduate School
• Adobe Dev Connection Content Contributor (I greatly appreciate the support from the Adobe Higher Ed team and allowing me to be a contributor on the Dev Connection site)
• IT Summit 2008 at Purdue University Poster Competition
• U.S. Provisional Patent (who would have thought a web/graphic user-interface guy would get a patent for designing a piece of hardware, it still makes me laugh inside)
  
• An overall summary, being a grad student doesn't necessarily also mean being a teaching assistant or a research assistant... but being a "black sheep" can be fun too, ha ha

Below is an article I wrote for the Adobe Developer Connection (Education Category). The full article, published July 2010, can be found at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/edu/articles/frank_garofalo.html

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"Multi-touch" technology has generated a large amount of buzz in the past several months. Some of the buzz is about mobile/handheld devices, and some has come from broadcast media's adoption of touch devices for their programs (such as CNN's "Magic Wall," NBC's Saturday Night Live, and ESPN). This has resulted in the term "multi-touch" being used to describe a broad range of interaction types, interfaces, and devices. Most of the uses for touch interfaces that I've seen have involved a single user interface allowing only one or two touch points at a time through tapping the screen or through gestures. However, the true capabilities of a "multi-touch" interface can accommodate multiple users interacting through any number of taps or gestures on the screen at the same time.

Multi-user Multi-touch

For the purpose of this article I do not refer to "multi-touch" to describe a smart-phone or hand-held device that can recognize only one or two points of touch simultaneously, such as a Motorola DROID; I refer to larger devices like the Microsoft Surface product that can accommodate multiple users and recognize points of touch from several users simultaneously (at least three simultaneous points of touch).

The research conducted as part of my graduate studies in the Department of Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University (www.tech.purdue.edu/cgt/) has been a qualitative examination of multi-user collaboration with multi-touch devices. The study explored the experience of users performing a common task in a shared environment (in this case the shared environment is the single display screen of the multi-touch device). For more details about this research study visit www.multiusermultitouch.com.

Digitally Replicating a Six Sigma Brainstorming Exercise

For my research, I designed and built my own multi-touch table (which is currently pending a U.S. Patent) that could showcase the interface I developed with the Adobe Flash Platform.

For the hardware, I used an open-source software package called Community Core Vision (CCV), created by the NUI Group, to serve as a liaison between the hardware components and the Adobe Flash Player. I developed an Adobe AIR application to recreate a brainstorming exercise used within Six Sigma, known as both "Affinity Diagrams" and "KJ Analysis." Typically in Affinity Diagram exercises, participants anonymously record and submit individual ideas or concepts on separate sticky notes. Then the participants sort through the sticky notes, grouping and categorizing them by moving them physically. Through this process, unforeseen relationships between the ideas can emerge. Since this activity requires participants to interact in a shared work environment in the physical world, I chose to replicate it in a multi-touch environment to explore the implications for a multi-user interface.

Exploring the Multi-user Interface

A moderator with Six Sigma Green-Belt certification and experience working with both corporations and universities served as a facilitator for the exercises performed during user testing. I selected Adobe AIR as the client since the application could run natively on a laptop computer connected to the multi-touch table, and chose the Adobe Flash Platform to capture the experience of multiple users simultaneously interacting with multi-touch interface and hardware. In the AIR application, users were able to move virtual sticky notes on the multi-touch table, and perform the same grouping and categorizing exercises that people do with physical sticky notes in an Affinity Diagram exercise.

While both the hardware and software of the multi-touch device created a few challenges for the participants on various levels, including occasional software failures, they were able to complete the exercises. That benefited not only this study, aimed at collecting qualitative data from the participants, but also the participants themselves, who were able to take the results of the Affinity Diagram exercises back to their respective organizations on the Purdue campus.

Affirming Research Assumptions

My goal was to determine whether a multi-touch interface and device can be a practical shared environment for a team of individuals to complete a common task. The participants indicated that for completing an Affinity Diagram exercise, the multi-touch device proved to be a useful tool and believe that it improved collaboration. The moderator for the Affinity Diagram exercise was surprised at the speed with which the participants in both rounds completed the tasks, despite a learning curve for them to become familiar with the multi-touch device. She remarked that she has "not done one on paper that quickly." Furthermore, participants in the study expressed appreciation for the usefulness the multi-touch device provided. It allowed them to see all the data in front of them at once, and to see most of the actions of their fellow participants.

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