Hello ecebloggers,

Friday 05/07/2008 was another exciting day of student presentations. The session chair was Dave Estes. He didn’t bring Budweiser (Dude!) but he did have a nice slide listing all the presenters (see picture below).

The first presentation today was from Nate Bourgoine. Nate’s project was on speaker recognition using high order formants. He thoroughly explained what he did and gave a nice demo. Here’s picture of Nate:

Next was Keith Spaulding (see picture below). Keith analyzed and synthesized the chant “OM”. He explained what we are supposed to achieve with chanting and the difference between speech processing we did in class and what he did.

Jon Carrier (in picture below) closed today’s day of presentations. Echo cancellation was the topic of his project. He explained the way echo appears and how he tried to handle it.

Monday 05/12/2008 is going to be the last day of student presentations. All pictures from the presentations can be found here.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Hello ecebloggers,

Wednesday 05/07/2008 was the second day of the student project presentations, and the day of prosody. The session chair was Yuanli Wang. He did a nice job with power point presentation so we would all know who is presenting. Here’s Yuanli’s picture.

I had the honor of breaking the ice today. My presentation was on prosody in HCI. I tried to describe human voice in HCI with pitch and power variances. Here’s picture of me in action.

Jeremy Kent analyzed prosody of emotions in R2D2’s voice. It seems that R2D2 has feelings, so if you run into him be careful how you talk to him. Here’s Jeremy giving us some details about R2D2’s voice.

After Jeremy, Mike Farrar presented. We had a similar topic. Mike was analyzing voice recorded on PDAs. He extracted a lot of data and gave a very informative presentation. Nice job Mike!

Another member of CATlab was presenting on Wednesday. Jon Oppelaar was analyzing speech for map task (one person explaining directions to another person – map task).

Another post about the presentations is coming this Friday 05/09/2008. All pictures from the presentations can be found here.

Have a good one,

Nemanja

Hello ecebloggers,

Monday was the first day of the student project presentations. The session chair was Ivan Elhart. Here’s Ivan introducing a presenter:

Four students were presenting: Zeljko Medenica, Dawe Schwarzenberg, Zach Clifton and Dave Estes. All four presentations were very interesting. Zeljko was trying to estimate pitch in a similar way as people hear. Here’s Zeljko during his presentation:

Zeljko ran a demo on a short wave file to show us how it works.

Dave Schwarzenberg’s project was also about pitch estimation. He tried to detect pitch with dynamic time wrapping. Here’s Dave:

Zach Clifton (see picture below) as a former musician tried to show acceptable variance in pitch for a vocalist. We also heard his lovely singing.

Before reading about Dave Estes’s project watch this video:

Dave (see picture below) used prosody to determine human emotions. He found the inspiration in Budweiser’s “Dude” ad. We had a few laugh listening to his wave files.

That’s all about Monday’s presentations. There’s more coming Wednesday 05/07/2008. You can find all the pictures from the presentation here.

Have a good one,

Nemanja

If you haven’t heard by now Microsoft’s http://maps.live.com has updated their routing algorithm to account for traffic. Check the box next to “Choose route based on traffic” to recalculated a route with traffic added into the equation.

The technology behind this is called Clearflow. Microsoft’s Adaptive Systems and Interaction group has created traffic models to predict congestion and find the quickest route.

Last week, at the suggestion of Tim Paek, I installed Microsoft FolderShare. The web-based service synchronizes the contents of folders on multiple computers. I find this to be useful in two ways. First, it allows me to share files with a Tim. He and I can both create folders on our machines, and instruct FolderShare to keep these folders in sync. Now, after a phone conference, Tim can place a PowerPoint file summarizing our action items into a folder on his computer, and moments later it appears on mine. In fact, FolderShare will synchronize folders across more than two computers, so you can use it to share files between larger groups.

The second way I started using FolderShare is to move files between my office computer and my laptop. I often work from home using my laptop (e.g. typing this) and up until now, I depended on a USB memory stick to move files between home and office. This presents two problems. One, the memory stick has limited memory. Two, I often misplace it, or simply forget to bring it to work. With FolderShare, I now have a folder on my laptop and on my office computer that are synced. No need to bring a memory stick with me anymore.

FolderShare will be a great tool to share files in our lab. E.g., my students often create videos (see here), which they need to get to me for review. Due to the large size of video files, this almost always means bringing a disk or memory stick to my office. With FolderShare we’ll be able to move files back and forth a lot more quickly.

Andrew Kun

Terry Wardrop of St. Paul’s School has been teaching an artificial intelligence (AI) class for a number of years, and he has been incorporating a visit to the Project54 lab in his class. On Thursday we had the opportunity to host Terry’s AI students again. My graduate students Oszkar Palinko and Zeljko Medenica demonstrated our driving simulator and eye tracker to our visitors. We also had Owen Derby on hand, who started working in our lab after having visited with Terry’s summer AI class last year.

Judging from the pictures (thanks Erika!) from the visit, everybody had a great time.

We’re looking forward to seeing you again this summer Terry.

Andrew Kun

The majority of law enforcement officers patrol areas while using a police vehicle for transportation.  Inside the vehicle, if it has been equipped with the Project54 system, the officer is provided with multiple safe-and-convenient interfaces which allow him or her to complete a variety of daily tasks.  What happens when the officer leaves the vehicle?  Well, without the Project54 system, access to many, if not all, of these features is lost.  However, with the system in place, a PDA may be added to the mix and an Ad-hoc network may be established between the device and the in-car computer of the police cruiser.  Under this configuration the officer remains in complete control over the checking of records, operating the lights and radar units, and even vehicle diagnostics to name a few.  Here is a video demonstration:

Michael A. Farrar

One of the most notable features of the Project54 system is its ability to provide officers with an organized means of checking records.  Once the required information on an individual has been entered into the vehicle computer, Project54 forwards the request to the mobile radio of the police cruiser for transmission.  On return, the information is received through the mobile radio and decoded by the in-car computer, where it is then neatly displayed to the officer for analysis.  All it takes it a day-trip to the beach to realize that not all officers are equipped with vehicles and RF radios.  Typically, in such environments, transportation is accomplished through all-terrain vehicle, bicycle, or simply by walking.  Therefore, a more manageable scenario for such patrolmen must be developed.

The Symbol MC50 (PDA) devices currently deployed are equipped with a 2D-imager/scanner, but do not provide cellular connectivity.  With the scanner, information is accurately and quicky entered into the data fields, but the checking of records under these configurations is only possible through the PDA-to-vehicle network, where the request is generated on the PDA, forwarded to the vehicle computer, and again forwarded to the RF radio.  These communications do present the officer with the desired information, but the requirement of the police cruiser is still present. 

Alternatively, we have purchased two Symbol MC70 (PDA) devices, each equipped with a 2D-imager/scanner and cellular modem (One with GPS – check back for future post relating to this).  After some slight modification to the Records Application implemented on the desktop machines, a mobile counterpart had been developed, providing record queries to the mobile officer.  Here is a video demonstration:

Michael A. Farrar

Over the past few months I have been developing several applications which allow for image capture, tagging, and organization on PDA and desktop devices, all of which were demonstrated at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) conference in Boulder, CO in early April.  Last week I had presented the imaging application to Lieutenant Mark Liebl of the NH State Police, who immediately recognized its value.  During a routine traffic stop, an officer will request identification from the individual under question, and as we all have done, he or she may have forgotten their drivers license at home.  In this situation Mark had stated that the information may be taken verbally and the individual’s status may be checked using the Records application of the Project54 system.  But what if the subject had given false information?  This is where the imager of the PDA comes into play.  After the verbal exchange, a photograph of the individual may be taken, and if necessary, reviewed at a later time to reveal the subject’s true identity.  Mark also believes that the imager could be used at the scene of most minor vehicle accidents. Here is a video which demonstrates the capturing and tagging techniques discussed above.

In addition to the imaging application, I have been developing two desktop applications which transfer and organize the images stored on the PDA.  The transfer application neatly synchronizes files stored on the desktop with those on the PDA, ensuring that duplicate files are not copied and that existing files are not overwritten.  Once the photographs have been transferred to the desktop PC, they and their tagging data may be easily viewed using the image management application.

 Michael A. Farrar

As I’ve written here before, I really cannot believe how poorly IEEE Xplore works. I have what the IEEE calls the IEEE Member Digital Library. This is a $35/month (!) service that allows you to download 25 (!!!) papers a month. So, I just tried to download a paper with the following result:

Seems pretty straightforward, right? IEEE Transactions, etc. However, I get this message:

“The content you requested is not included in your subscription.”

Hmmm… So I check to make sure my Member Digital Library is up to date, and I see that it expires April 30, 2008 (today’s date), so that should be fine. I call the IEEE and they confirm my suspicion that, since I’m logging in from work, and my institution (UNH) has a subscription, the IEEE system confuses me with UNH. SinceUNH’s subscription doesn’t allow access to this paper, I can’t access it.

Now, I did tell the very nice person on the phone (Virginia) that this is UNBELIEVABLE. This is the IEEE. And this is a $420/year service. And it’s work related, so I need to be able to access it from WORK. And most infuriatingly, it’s not even a consistent problem. I’ve downloaded plenty of papers from work using Xplore, while other times, like today, I was thwarted.

My grave concern was noted, and I received a promise that if I email Virginia the title of the article, I will receive a copy of it via email. I will also get credit for the papers I was not able to download this month on my next month’s allotment of papers (kind of like the minutes roll-over on a cell phone plan). Thanks Virginia. I hope you do tell management that they need to make fixing this service a priority.

Andrew Kun