Driving Assessment 2007 featured three poster sessions. One of these (the hybrid session) was accompanied by what the Ubicomp and Pervasive conferences call one-minute madness (in the DA version the sound of a gong was embedded in the presenter’s Powerpoint slide and the goal of course was complete your presentation before the gong).

Here are a couple of words about several posters that I liked. First, there was Ensar Becic’s poster on the effects on driving performance of a conversation with a passenger or on a cell phone. Ensar is a graduate student in the HPP lab at UIUC. I thought it was interesting that they found that driving performance was worse (!) when participants only drove and did not engage in a conversation. We found something similar in our work that will be published at Interspeech 2007, although we did not discuss this in the paper (partly because we don’t have an explanation for it yet). Here’s a picture of Ensar discussing his poster:

I also liked Eike Schmidt’s poster on assessing driver vigilance during monotonous driving. Eike works for DaimlerChrysler and his team used EEG vigilance measures. EEG measures found that participants were negatively affected by long, monotonous driving. Participants subjectively felt better about their state towards the end of the drive but this was not reflected in the measurements. This is a common problem with us humans - we don’t always assess our abilities well. Here’s Eike and his poster:

Paul Green of UMTRI had an excellent poster on inconsistencies and errors in measuring driving performance in simulators and on the road. He recommends procedures to avoid these inconsistencies and errors which are well worth taking to heart. I expect the paper to be posted here soon.

Finally, I have to mention John Sullivan’s introduction of his poster in the hybrid session. John works at UMTRI and with his colleagues he explored the performance and workload for drivers who used night vision systems. The paper is excellent and the introduction matched the quality of the paper: John started out by listing Google keywords that one might use to find his paper and capped this off with a haiku-style poem.

Andrew Kun

Driving Assessment 2007 got off to a great start with Don Norman’s keynote entitled “The Design of Future Things: Cautious Cars.” Don talked about automation and how it’s finding its way into automobiles. One of his main points was that partial automation is very dangerous. By partial automation Don means systems that help drivers when control is easy but stop working suddenly (without sufficient warning) when things get complicated and their intervention may actually be useful. One example is a commercially available lane keeping system that does not provide the full torque necessary to return the car into a lane (thus requiring user input to accomplish returning to the lane) and then actually completely stops working if the car is moving fast and gets far enough out of its lane. You can see the logic of the manufacturer (maybe you wanted to move out of the lane quickly?) but you can also see that a machine’s help would be very useful when you’re supposed to make split-second decisions that may save your life. Here’s a great slide from the talk and a vision for a symbiotic human-car relationship:

Andrew Kun

Hello eceblogger readers!

I am an avid reader of the news site slashdot.org (commonly known as /.) which had an article I thought to share with you all. It was a link to sciencehack.com which is a site that contains links to videos submitted by the public on the popular site youtube and Metacafe. One thing they do differently however, is that before the videos go live, it is reviewed for accuracy by someone specializing in the field of the topic of the video. It is a new site with already quite a collection of interesting videos.

Some cool videos that emerged in my browsing of the site, is the answer to the problem that has troubled me and many others is how to solve those silly Rubik’s cubes. A cool solution to dead AAA batteries was also posted here. All I ever did was wind wires around the two electrodes of the 9V batteries, and watch the battery heat-up/melt/explode. Important topics like vectors are also explained. There are other interesting and valuable videos on the site that make you a smarter person, or force your parents to kick you out of their basement. Either way, it is definitely worth checking out.

Andras Fekete

Hello, my name is Zeljko Medenica and I am a research assistant with Project54. I am working on human-computer voice interactions in vehicles and this post is about one of the experiments that I conducted in our lab.

Probably everybody knows how many electronic devices police officers have in their cruisers. Although they are very important in their everyday work, they are also a potential source of distraction. The reason is that most of these devices have manual hardware controls that require taking one’s hand off the wheel and eyes off the road, which increases the likelihood of crashes.

Last year professor Kun and I performed an experiment regarding the effects of different user interfaces on driving performance. The experiment was based on the interaction with a mobile police radio. We compared the effects of this interaction while using the manual controls installed on the radio and the Project54 speech-user interface. The results were very important. They showed that the manual interaction significantly influenced driving performance, while the speech interaction did not. On the video below you can see examples of how the manual and the Project54 speech-user interfaces were used during the experiment and what their influence was on driving performance.

Using these results we wrote a paper “Comparing the Influence of Two User Interfaces for Mobile Radios on Driving Performance” which was accepted for publication at the Driving Assessment 2007 conference. The conference will be held in Stevenson, WA from 9 – 14^th of July. I am especially excited about this conference because this is my very first paper. I am looking forward to it and I will have some more posts after the conference is over.

Zeljko Medenica

Are you planning to watch the Live Earth concert on Saturday, 7/7/07? To learn more about efforts to solve the global climate crisis you can check out Al Gore’s website. The website also has a link to Live Earth.

Andrew Kun

Recently Project54 completed its second and third motorcycle installations for Greenland, NH and Lee, NH, respectively. Because this was not a standard vehicle installation, we had to make a few adaptations, like compacting all the equipment (i.e. the radio, radar, battery system, CAN network, etc.) into an area approximately 60cm x 45cm x 15cm, which is the inner dimension of the rear cargo box.

The completed installation, as pictured below, allows the officers to utilize all their devices (such as the radio, light, etc.) in the same fashion as they did prior to the Project54 installation. Now, however, with the addition of the Project54 system they can also use the wireless touch screen to control, and get feedback from, all the devices, even the radar which was not normally accessible otherwise.

As mentioned above, the wiring, and most devices for this installation, were required to fit into the rear cargo box, which made space of the essence. The rear box, as seen below, also contains the laptop computer and radar head for easy access for the officer, making that essentially a mobile office.

Finally, to give you a glimpse of the inner workings of the system, here’s a picture of the box’s interior, the so called “heart” of the installation.

As you can see, there is a definite shortage on excess space. We therefore had to plan the placement of each item in order to optimize the space used. Some items, such as the battery and its charging system (top silver box and black boxes to the right of it) proved to be quite of a challenge.

Overall, the installations went successfully and both motorcycles are currently being phased into operation.

You can find additional pictures and descriptions here.

Matthew Lape