Hi, I’m Jeff Craighead, PhD (aka Dr. SplatSoSoft on Fortnite). I recently joined Soar Technology, Inc (SoarTech) as a Research Scientist at the Orlando office and am back to working on AI, simulations, and serious games. I am also a partner and the System Architect at Silent Partner Technologies (SPT) in Tampa. I was the Chief of Many Hats at SPT for 6 years, doing most of the programming for our web, mobile, embedded and desktop applications myself as well as visiting clients, directing installation of equipment, and managing our IT infrastructure. I really enjoyed working for myself and my partners to build some pretty cool RFID products; however I’d been feeling like it was time to put my Science Hat back on. So, when I got a call from the SoarTech recruiter I jumped at the opportunity. It has been really fun getting back into reading academic articles, prepping to write some SBIR proposals, and working with other researchers again.
I received my PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Florida in August 2009. My dissertation research was focused on the use of video games for training law enforcement personel in the basics of robot teleoperation while working in physically distributed teams. SARGE is the game I’m developing for my dissertation work, the link to the SARGE site at SourceForge is on the right. This work is an extension/combination of the areas of Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Intelligent Tutoring, and Game-Based Education. The work will be the first distributed, game-based, intelligent tutoring system that I know of and is doubly interesting because robot operation is a complex manipulation task. Typical Intelligent Tutoring systems cover material that is more memorization than physical such as reading strategies or physics concepts. I have 11 publications in the area of games and simulation as related to robotics and user interaction listed on the Publications page and in my CV.
I live in Groveland, Florida with my wife Jamie, our two sons Alex and Kent, and our French bulldog Lola. Alex is now 10 years old, Kent is 8 and Lola is 18 months.
I’m am a private pilot, I’ve got about 75 hours so far. I haven’t flown in quite a while, unfortunately, but I plan on getting back in the air as soon as I can! There is a great seaplane base in Tavares, about 20 miles north of our house, so I think I’m going to go for a seaplane rating once I get a new medical or get my BasicMed completed.
Prior to working at SPT I was Director of the Intelligent Systems Lab at the VA Research Center of Excellence on Maximizing Rehabilitation Outcomes, part of the James A. Haley VA hospital in Tampa.
My research involved the use of ultra-wide band RFID tags for monitoring patients in assisted living facilities and a VA Smart Home. For one of the UWB project my associates are looking for ways to detect when a patient is more likely to fall so that the ALF administrators can be notified. My research within the context of the project was to create a set of algorithms to monitor residents/patients in real time and warn of a impending fall or give a probability of a fall occurring soon. The VA Smart Home on the other hand was my baby. I was one of the principle authors of the grant proposal, which was awarded nearly $3M in February 2010. Following the award, I managed the design and development of a suite of hardware and software systems to enable location and behavior based cognitive rehabilitation within the James A. Haley VA’s Polytrauma Transitional Rehabilitation Program. Over the last five years we have demonstrated and published on the effectiveness of this system for monitoring and intervening in the TBI recovery process. I had to step away from the day-to-day management of the project in 2012 when I reduced my time at the VA, however I have maintained a consulting role on the project with respect to system development and the use of RTFPA.
My project on integrating sensor systems created an application that fuses data from multiple position tracking and motion analysis systems to diagnose gait and balance problems in VA patients. I was working with a commercial partner on this using their wireless sensors for this purpose. Eventually I decided to use the accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer that is built into the iPhone 4. This is a far cheaper solution and easier for the clinicians to deal with. This work has given me an opportunity to learn Objective-C since everyone in the lab are Mac users.
I also tinkered with touch sensitive material for use in clinical applications as well as the mbed and Arduino microcontroller kits. I built a force glove to provide feedback to the wearer about their grip strength. For this and some other small data collection projects I’ve had the opportunity to build custom PCBs to integrate microcontrollers, sensors, and memory modules onto a nice little package.
You can download a PDF of my complete CV here.