Me

Hi! My name’s Alistair, and I’m a Computer Science grad who enjoys making things. I’m based in Vancouver, studying in Dinesh K. Pai’s Sensorimotor lab. I design and build hardware and software for our research on modeling human tissues.

Check out my GitHub here, or peruse my LinkedIn profile. I occasionally post printable 3D models on Thingiverse and tweet tweets on Twitter.

Publications

• The Human Touch: Measuring Contact with Real Human Bodies. We created physically-meaningful simulations of human tissue by tuning our simulation parameters to match real-world observations, which we captured with custom hardware. Our hardware measures the force/deformation response of soft tissue under various loading scenarios, and images the surface to additionally capture the characteristic sliding motion of human skin.

Other Big Projects

• ModuleSim is an open-source design and simulation tool for a set of modular computer “tiles” which the University of Bristol uses as part of its Computer Architecture teaching. It provides a simple but true-to-life environment in which students can try out hardware designs, from basic combinatorial addition circuits all the way up to real processors with real I/O (and even LED displays!). I wrote ModuleSim from scratch in 2013, alongside my work designing several of the hardware “tiles”. The project is now maintained by the University.
• EvoArm is my open-source 3D-printable robot arm design, complete with an inverse kinematics solver written in Python. I built the arm for my University of Bristol master’s thesis project, which you can see in action here.