Interactive Computing Experiences Research Cluster: People: Eugene Taranta

Eugene Taranta

Dr. Eugene M. Taranta II received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UCF in 2006 and after a long break, his MS in Computer Science in 2012. He currently works as a Senior Embedded Systems Engineer at Northrop Grumman Corporation. He previously worked as a Senior Firmware Engineer for Xyratex Ltd., specializing in RAID technology, a career that started with part-time QA work during his Junior year of high school. After writing a somewhat terrible iPhone game (The StickZombie Massacre) as a self-introduction to game development, and after being immensely inspired by Alan Wake, he decided to return to school in 2011 to learn more about how great games are made--the theory and mathematics of (since he has little artistic or storytelling aptitude). Challenging projects and intriguing research have since motivated him to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Dr. Taranta received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2020 and his dissertation is on gesture recognition: "The Dollar General: Continuous Custom Gesture Recognition Techniques at Everyday Low Prices"

Research interests include: Gesture recognition, computer graphics, and RAID performance and coding theory.

Projects

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Publications

Taranta, E., Koh, S., Williamson, B., Pfeil, K., Pittman, C., and LaViola J. "Pitch Pipe: An Automatic Low-Pass Filter Calibration Technique for Pointing Tasks", Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2019, Article 27: 8 pages, May 2019.
Williamson, B., Taranta, E., Garrity, P., Sottilare, R., and LaViola, J. "A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Sensor Array Configurations for SLAM Tracking with Agile Movements", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces 2019, 1230-1231, March 2019.
Pfeil, K., Taranta, E., Kulshreshth, A., Wisniewski, P., and LaViola, J. "A Comparison of Eye-Head Coordination Between Virtual and Physical Realities", Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP '18), Article 18: 7 pages, August 2018.
Taranta, E., Samiei, A., Maghoumi, M., Khaloo, P, Pittman, C., and LaViola, J. "Jackknife: A Reliable Recognizer with Few Samples and Many Modalities", Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17), 5850-5861, May 2017.
Taranta, E., Maghoumi, M., Pittman, C., and LaViola, J. "A Rapid Prototyping Approach to Synthetic Data Generation for Improved 2D Gesture Recognition", Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '16). 873-885, October 2016.
Eugene Taranta, Sumanta Pattanaik "A Memory Efficient Uniform Grid Build Process For GPUs", The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques Volume 5, Number 3
Taranta, E., Vargas, A., Compton, S., LaViola, J. "A Dynamic Pen-based Interface for Writing and Editing Complex Mathematical Expressions With Math Boxes", ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.
Vargas, A., Taranta, E., LaViola, J. "Sketch Based Interaction Techniques for Chart Creation and Manipulation", 2016 Conference on Pen and Touch Technology in Education.
Pittman, C., Taranta, E., and LaViola, J. "A $-Family Friendly Approach to Prototype Selection", Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2016), March 2016.
Taranta, E., Vargas, A., and LaViola, J. "Streamlined and accurate gesture recognition with Penny Pincher", Special Section on Graphics Interface, October 2015.
Taranta, E. and Pattanaik, S. "An Efficient GPU Uniform Grid Build Process", Poster Session Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2015.
Taranta, E. and LaViola, J. "Penny Pincher: A Blazing Fast, Highly Accurate $-Family Recognizer", Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2015, 195-202, June 2015.
Taranta, E. and LaViola, J. "Math Boxes: A Pen-Based User Interface for Writing Difficult Mathematical Expressions", Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2015), 87-96, March 2015.
Taranta, E., Simons, K., Sukthankar, R., and LaViola, J. "Exploring the Benefits of Context in 3D Gesture Recognition for Game-Based Virtual Environments", ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 5(1):Article 1 (34 pages), March 2015.
Taranta, E. and Pattanaik, S. "Macro 64-regions for uniform grids on GPU", The Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics, 30(6-8), June 2014 pp 615-624, (Tied 2nd best paper).

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Patents

Taranta, E. (Granted) Detection and correction of silent data corruption
Taranta, E. (Granted) Layout rectification of erasure encoded storage systems
Taranta, E. (Granted) Repeating Patterns for Nearly Random Permutations
Taranta, E. (Granted) Efficient Sparing for Nearly Random Permutations

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