Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony

Winter 2021 - Present

Lead Researchers: Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, Jared Duval
Advisors: Sri Kurniawan, Katheryn M. Ringland
Undergraduate Research Team: Ellen Kim, Ryoma Marta-Sugawara, Qinhui Yu, Rafael Costa, Eric Jang

DREEM (Disability-Related Empathy from Existing Media) is a method proposed as a response to Disability Justice calls to appreciate and Cultural content such as videos and podcasts are rich with authentic perspectives and tacit design knowledge from communities of people with disabilities. The goal of DREEM is to use media created by people with disabilities to establish meaningful research agendas. The motivations of DREEM work include recent critiques of technosolutionism, inspiring methods used in humanities and social sciences (e.g., close reading and netnography, empathy that builds partnerships with people with disabilities rather than trying to experience disability ourselves [61], and sharing labor in taxing design work, —all as a precursor to working directly with communities. DREEM consists of 4 empathy-building steps towards developing authentic research agendas: 1) Discover relevant media, 2) Perform close readings 3) record autoethnographic reflections, and 4) Generate research agendas based on a thematic analysis.

For an example close reading (done as a group example in an undergraduate research course), see this miro board. For more info, you can check out our paper, in review .

June 2020 - Present

Lead Researcher: Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony
Undergraduate Developmers: Jessy Rakesh Armstrong, Rishita Wiaragade, Daniel Browne
Advisors: Sri Kurniawan, Tim Galarneau, Heather Bullock, Kednel Jean

Due to COVID-19 restructuring, many students have moved away and will not be able to access many of the programs from UCSC. Basic needs are the fundamental necessities needed in order to live and thrive. This project details efforts to make basic needs programs from any UC easily available to any UC student. While campuses have already agreed to provide these services across campuses, there is not a centralized access point. A centralized web application would allow students to see available resources all in one place and campuses to post or disclose which services are available to outside students.

The website is set to launch this Summer. Keep an eye out at ucbasicneeds.ucsc.edu You can also find a short research presentation on this project here.

Winter 2018

This Project uses Wave Function Collapse to generate piano roll. Wave function collapse is an algorithm that produces tile based imaged, commonly used for game map generation. Piano roll is a type of music scoring which you may recognize from any experience with digital audio workstations. A user can generate their own roll, then choose a key to generate a midi file assosciated with the score. The example audio, which can be found in the github repo, is from a procedurally generated image and played in C Major.

For more info, or to download the code, you can check out the github repo.

Spring 2017

Development Team: Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, Vishnu Surya, Jamie Dieckman

Mechatronics is a UCSC course in which team of 3 are given just a few weeks to build a robot from the ground up and compete. Teams build their autonomous bots from scratch including sensors, structure and code. Our team split the development of electrical, mechanical, and software components equally so that we could each pick up where anyone left off or had trouble. This strategy worked as we won the final competition of about 20 other bots!

For more info, you can check out our final report , or watch a video of our bot winning the final round of the competition.

Banana Slug Brass Quintet

The Banana Slug Brass has been performing at the University of California Santa Cruz and beyond since 2014.

We play everything from renaissance to Mariah Carey. We enjoy playing across the Bay Area, and are available for engagements. Contact me for more info at bre@ucsc.edu