Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony

Winter 2020 - Winter 2023

Lead Researchers: Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, Jared Duval
Advisors: Sri Kurniawan, Katheryn M. Ringland

Empathy-building is the first stage in human-centered design. For work related to disabled populations, this stage usually entails imagining the experience of living with a disability (i.e., empathy maps and disability simulations). Yet, these have been shown to cultivate negative perspectives and pity rather than empathy. These suboptimal (even counterproductive) empathy-building methods remain standard practice in our feld and teaching practices and can inadvertently reinforce negative stereotypes and biases toward disabled communities.

We have developed a new method: Disability-Related Empathy from Existing Media (DREEM). This method focuses on enculturation rather than traditional ideas of empathy. DREEM leverages media created by disabled individuals to facilitate a deeper, culturally informed understanding. Our findings show that DREEM can be applied in both design classrooms and research contexts to foster a more nuanced understanding of disability for newcomers to the space.

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 .

Spring 2020 - Fall 2021

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.

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