Brian ByungHyun Shin

Adding tools.brianshin.me

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I created a projects page at tools.brianshin.me to share small projects I create. This is inspired by Simon Willison’s blog and his tools page. I’ve started creating a few tools using Claude’s artifacts tool, which is amazing. Going forward, I hope I can use this page to host interesting tools and ideas that aren’t limited to just a single-page HTML/JS page.

I’ve made a bunch of things now with Claude, but so far the ones I’m putting on the tools page are:

Youtube Translate landing page A sample landing page I’m working on.
Annual Return Calculator A quick page to help calculate an investor’s compound annual return, given starting, ending, and withdrawal/deposit amounts. I made this because I find myself wondering this more often than I’d like to admit and wanted a quick, no-frills place I could go to calculate it.

This new workflow of using Claude’s artifacts tool and the model behind it (Claude Sonnet 3.5 new today) feels like a game-changer. I’ve been using it heavily for my main work in coding now, and I can’t really go back. It’s one of those things where, once you know it exists, you can’t go back to a world where that knowledge doesn’t exist for you. Kind of like having experienced seeing color for the first time I guess. It’s also great that I can create new tools from my iPad or phone, and see the results. It’s like magic - I’ve been going through my running ideas doc and literally having Claude spin up my ideas for me in less than five minutes.

I want to try some of the more advanced tools where you can host React apps that Claude builds: claude-artifact-runner. Of course, I hope it isn’t long where I can ask AI to build full web apps with full-stack functionality and deploy them as trivially as I have with these html pages.

I analogize what’s happening today with these kinds of tools as similar to when the printing press was invented, or when computers and specifically word-processing/typing came out. It is like a step-change in enabling everyone to create or write, and consequently this has second-order effects on consuming the writings and increasing overall productivity.

Of course, I think real business value will always come from focusing, iterating and refining a solution to a problem, and solving real people’s needs. In that sense, the ability to quickly prototype is very valuable but not as valuable as building a product or products as a business over a long period of time. I guess it would be like the proliferation of printing and typing/word processing enabling the best writers, publications, important works to be distributed and enjoyed even more, and not necessarily killing any advantages they had simply because they could write well already.

This tools page was relatively painless to set up. Even though my main website is now on Gitlab Pages, I set up this tools subdomain on Github pages, and it was easy to set up the custom domain edits on Cloudflare DNS.

CES 2021

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

CES 2021 was virtual due to COVID-19, but our team's work, LGSVL Simulator, was featured in the LGE CTO's LG Future Talk. This was very cool, as it was one of only a few projects highlighted as part of LG Electronics' broader business and technology initiatives at CES. You can see LG's CTO I.P. Park talk about it below, as well as the video demos our team created.

CES 2020

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At CES 2020, we showed off LGSVL Simulator at the public Automotive Grade Linux exhibit once again. We gave demos of advances in LGSVL Simulator, including new capabilities like being able to procedurally generate environments using VectorZero's RoadRunner tool, then importing to our simulator.

Additionally, at least three other companies at CES 2020 were demonstrating the LGSVL Simulator technology in their respective booths, a sign of growing adoption!

At the award-winning AWS Automotive exhibit, Unity showed off their product, Unity Simulation, demonstrating LGSVL Simulator being scaled and run in the cloud. You can read more about it here.

Apex.AI also used LGSVL Simulator to demonstrate their product, Apex.AI and Apex.OS. You can watch their CES 2020 video below.

DXC also demonstrated their offerings, and demonstrated LGSVL Simulator technology in their booth. You can read more about Robotic Drive here.

ROSCon and IROS 2019

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

ROSCon and the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems (IROS - one of the two biggest robotics conferences every year) were held in Macau in 2019.

We went to give a talk at ROSCon, as well as demonstrate LGSVL Simulator and webOS Robotics at exhibitor booths in both conferences. You can see my presentation at ROSCon on my presentations page.

You can see our prototype robot at our booth in IROS. Though the hardware looks very prototype-ey, the software is pretty impressive. It is a multi-display touchscreen user interface, algorithms to detect obstacles and faces, ROS 2 and teleoperation control, and voice recognition, all running on one single Raspberry Pi 4.

Today, a lot of autonomous mobile robots deployed commercially have very powerful workstations on them running Ubuntu - we demonstrate the advantages of using a lightweight embedded operating system on much cheaper hardware to meet all the typical use cases of a mobile robot.

We also demonstrated LGSVL Simulator, for developers working on autonmous vehicles or robotics needing simulation tools.

Unity Unite 2019

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

At Unity's annual Unite conference in 2019, Unity Simulations was debuted. Unity Simulations is made for running cloud simulations for applications based on Unity, focused on industrial applications such as automotive, transportation, and robotics.

You can see part of the keynote featuring LGSVL Simulator in the video below.

SVL Simulator

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

SVL Simulator (formerly LGSVL Simulator) is an autonomous vehicle and robotics simulator. It is for engineers and developers building autonomous vehicle (AV) software or robotics algorithms, which they can use to test and verify their systems. It provides a real time 3D virtual environment to provide the dynamic environment, the “world”, that the AV or robotics stack perceives through its sensors. It is based on the Unity game engine.

It’s a product that is free to use, and open source on Github (with LG’s own license). This is what I have spent most of my time building at LG for the last three years or so, and this page shows off more about what it is and the public impact it has had in the autonomous vehicle and robotics spaces.

Who Uses It

SVL Simulator is used by:

Engineers at companies building autonomous vehicle and robotics software and systems
Engineers at companies developing parts of or technologies for autonomous vehicle systems: sensors, hardware-in-the-loop, engineering services
Researchers and students investigating autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine learning, and many other applications such as security, future mobility, and new programming languages

Some numbers

~3000 monthly active users around the world
Downloaded over 50,000 times since our launch in November 2018
Usually at least 20 simulations being run at any time globally!

Research

Below are links to some highlighted papers referencing the SVL Simulator by LG.

LGSVL Simulator: A High Fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving - Our own paper published in IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems 2020 giving an overview.
Formal Scenario-Based Testing of Autonomous Vehicles: From Simulation to the Real World - A scenario-based testing framework and scenario description language, using SVL Simulator.
Safety Assessment and Simulation of Autonomous Vehicle in Urban Environments - a safety evaluation of a real autonomous vehicle shuttle using our simulator.

Public projects using SVL Simulator

The 2021 IEEE Autonomous Driving AI Test Challenge - a challenge for building testing frameworks for autonomous vehicles using SVL Simulator as the competition platform to be evaluated against.
F1Tenth - A competition for small-scale autonomous racing vehicles, using SVL Simulator for simulation
Autoware Foundation Autonomous Valet Parking 2020 - A hackathon to demonstrate an autonomous valet parking operational design domain (ODD) use case, first in simulation then in the real world.
Special Topics in Autonomous Driving: A graduate engineering class at San Jose State University in Spring 2020 that adopted SVL Simulator as part of its curriculum.

Presentations

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

ROSCon 2019, Oct. 2019. “ROS on OpenEmbedded: Simpler robotics development for embedded Linux”

My colleagues and I gave a talk at ROSCon 2019 in Macau presenting the advantages of using embedded Linux for robotics development. We also demonstrated a real robot at the conference showcasing the use cases. Slides.

AI Robotics KR, Oct. 2019. “ROS2 on webOS”

Presentation to 150 audience members at AI Robotics meetup in Seoul about LG’s webOS Robotics intiative and open source robotics work. Slides.

Silicon Valley Autoware Meetup, Sep. 2019. “LGSVL Simulator: Advanced Sensor Rendering for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation”

A presentation given by a colleague and myself on LGSVL Simulator and its sensor simulation for a Silicon Valley Autoware Meetup attended by 50 people, hosted by Apex.AI in Palo Alto. You can see parts of the live demo and Q&A session in the video below.

ROSCon 2018, Oct. 2018. “ROS2 on webOS: Web-app enabled robots”

I gave a lightning talk at ROSCon 2018 about the Beanbird bot prototype demonstrating LG’s embedded operating system webOS running ROS2. This was a precursor to our full presentation a year later at ROSCon 2019.

CES 2019

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Although I didn't personally go to CES 2019, our team went as part of the Automotive Grade Linux exhibit. Building on our prior year's exhibit, we showed an in-vehicle infotainment system running AGL, in which we'd ported Enact, a web application framework, to the operating system.

We had recently launched LGSVL Simulator a couple months prior, and also showed the autonomous vehicle simulator. The simulator was connected to an instance of Apollo, an open source autonomous vehicle stack, and we demonstrated an in-vehicle experience for a driver who could see on their dashboard what the AV stack was doing to navigate in the virtual environment. The AV stack, of course, doesn't distinguish whether it's in a “real world” environment or our virtual one.

You can see a video of the full demo given by my colleagues below.

CES 2018

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My first CES experience was CES 2018, where I got to go represent LG Silicon Valley Lab (the name has since changed to LG America R&D Lab) to show off our team's work.

We were part of the Automotive Grade Linux exhibit, showing off an automotive HMI concept and services surrounding it, including a cloud mobility service for fleet management based on smartphone data (ahead of its time) and a driving simulator used for development and testing of in-vehicle infotainment interfaces.

Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a Linux Foundation project with member companies that work towards developing an automotive-grade operating system and surrounding ecosystem. LG Silicon Valley, with its historical expertise and development of webOS (which succeeded Palm OS), was involved in contributing many parts to AGL, including the compositor, media capabilities, and web application frameworks. Today, webOS is deployed on the millions of LG smart TVs worldwide.

You can see the beginnings of what would become SVL Simulator here. It was originally a driving simulator used to demonstrate the capabilities of the dashboard and cluster HMI we built to showcase our embedded operating system. Something that's still so cool to me: we're streaming the HMI screen back to the simulator, and displaying it! You can imagine how you could enable VR user testing for developing future in-car experiences.

The second edition of Logistics Tech Review

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have written and published the second edition of Logistics Tech Review. You can find the post here.

Logistics Tech Review is a newsletter focusing on how technology and automation are affecting the logistics and supply chain industries. It’s meant for anyone interested in technology trends within logistics, freight, shipping, and warehousing. I hope it brings value to readers ranging from executives and managers in the logistics industry, investors and analysts covering the space, or just anyone interested in automation, robotics, and transportation.

You can subscribe to my newsletter here. For now, I am using Twitter as the main distribution channel: @LogisticsReview.

Brian ByungHyun Shin

Adding tools.brianshin.me

CES 2021

CES 2020

ROSCon and IROS 2019

Unity Unite 2019

SVL Simulator

Who Uses It

Some numbers

Research

Public projects using SVL Simulator

Links

Presentations

ROSCon 2019, Oct. 2019. “ROS on OpenEmbedded: Simpler robotics development for embedded Linux”

AI Robotics KR, Oct. 2019. “ROS2 on webOS”

Silicon Valley Autoware Meetup, Sep. 2019. “LGSVL Simulator: Advanced Sensor Rendering for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation”

ROSCon 2018, Oct. 2018. “ROS2 on webOS: Web-app enabled robots”

CES 2019

CES 2018

The second edition of Logistics Tech Review