Hi Ecebloggers,

This time, I decided to write something about the current activities in my college, IIT Guwahati. After completing my internship at UNH , I always thought how I could promote the current research work at UNH and my pilot experiment work for obstacle testing during the internship period. Fortunately, the electronics department in our institute has initiated a lecture series on certain crucial areas of research in the electronics domain. This lecture series is being organized and managed by Cepstrum, the IIT Guwahati ECE society. I volunteered to contribute in this lecture series, the topic being “Speech Processing and In vehicle Interaction”. Quite Interestingly, much more students showed up for this lecture than was expected. I gradually commenced from defining speech synthesis , speech recognition etc. and later slowly paced up the proceedings covering the in - vehicle speech user interface. For elucidating an “in vehicle speech user interface” in a limited time, nothing could serve better than the demo video available for the Project54 speech user interface on the Catlab website. I then moved on to expand some details about my work at UNH and then finally covered the future prospects and current research at the Microsoft Research Lab, US. I used the Microsoft Research Driving simulator video to show the future directions in this field. Since some of the listeners were first year and second year undergraduates, I had to restrict myself to the basics of speech without going into the technical details. Here is a picture from the lecture and the rest can be found on this website.

Now, something about the listeners’ responses..Some of the second year undergraduates were interested to know about certain specific fields like keyword spotting and speech recognition. Since my final year B.Tech project at IIT Guwahati is on “Speech based Emotion recognition” , I was able to suggest some parameters imperative for emotion and speech recognition but again, without going into the finer technical details. Moving on, some juniors were interested to know how the lane variance and the steering wheel angle variance measures could be used to actually improve the driving performance. To vividly reply that query, I mentioned about the current research work being done in Project54 Lab to improve the driver performance. I remembered reading Oszkar’s paper on the wireless Push to Talk Glove and thus quoted it as an example, elaborating how it is better than the fixed PTT switch and helps to improve the driving performance. Finally, I concluded the lecture providing the website address for eceblogger as a resource for information about the latest proceedings in the Project 54 Lab. Thus to summarize , I had a wonderful time and I hope I could have incited some enthusiasm in my junior undergraduates.

Puneet Lakhanpal

Last Friday Oskar Palinko defended his MS thesis. Oszkar’s thesis was centered around the cool push-to-talk (PTT) glove he has designed.

Oszkar ran a rather large user study (24 participants) to evaluate if the PTT glove outperforms a fixed PTT button. While in comparing driving performance when using the two PTT solutions Oszkar didn’t find a main effect, he did find that the experiment participants looked down at the steering wheel more often when using the fixed PTT. Is this a problem? Maybe. While the total amount of time subjects spent looking at the steering wheel when using the fixed PTT button amounted to about 1% of the total experiment time, the average fixation was around 300 ms long. If such a fixation came at the wrong time (e.g. at the moment a leading vehicle started to brake), this could be a problem.

Congratulations Oszkar on a job well done!

Andrew Kun

This fall I’ll be teaching a graduate level course on ubiquitous computing (ECE 992). The course will look at recent research in this field, or more accurately in a few segments of this field. Specifically, we’ll look at the visions of ubicomp, some applications, human-computer interfaces, context awareness and privacy.

The course will revolve around reviews of the recent ubicomp research literature. I envision something similar to an NSF review panel, with instructions on what to pay attention to (they won’t be exactly NSF instructions but will have similarities to those), a lead reviewer who starts off the review process, a scribe who takes notes and where the entire class constitutes the panel.

Students will also work on a ubicomp project - basically either the evaluation of an existing ubicomp system, the design of the specifications for a new system or the implementation of a new system. I hope that people who decide to take the course will bring their own ideas from their research or work and that we can create projects that will be useful to them in those domains. I know a couple of students from my lab will be able to do this.

You can check out the course website here and relevant links here. Questions? Send me an email.

Andrew Kun

Last week Tim Paek of Microsoft Research visited the Project54 lab at UNH. Tim and I have been collaborating for about two years now, and this summer Tim is the supervisor of my PhD student, Zeljko Medenica, during Zeljko’s summer internship with MSR.

As part of his visit Tim gave a talk on his research in the field of mobile speech interaction. The talk covered three topics. First, Tim discussed his work on the Voice Command. Tim worked on utilizing user models to reduce the semantic error rate. Next, he talked about using reinforcement learning in a voice enabled browser. Finally, Tim talked about a mobile voice search application. The application provides intuitive ways to help the search application find the right answer. One way this is accomplished is by allowing multimodal refinements to the search. E.g. the user can help the speech recognizer by typing in the first letters of a problem word in an utterance. Another way is by allowing uncertain queries in the search (you can say “something” as part of the search to indicate you’re not sure what the exact search term should be). As part of the talk Tim gave a live demo of the mobile voice search application:

The talk was very interesting and the demo was impressive - thanks Tim! For more pictures click here.

Andrew Kun

As many of you may know, I spent a good part of the summer in front of the video-editing computer transcribing data from videos of experiments. I used Adobe Premiere to organize and view the videos. However, Adobe Premiere was made for movie/cinematic editing, not data transcription, so I had to “invent” a few ways to import and export the data. I also found a few problems/bugs, so I wrote all of this up in a document which can be found here. I structured this as a sort of FAQ on using Premiere, so I also added some basic (yet vital) processes that took me a while to figure out (like capturing video and exporting videos). Enjoy!

Owen Derby

I have recently realized that when I open multiple documents in Excel they all show up separately on Taskbar but show up in the same window of Excel. This can be very aggravating for anyone who works with multiple documents and multiple monitors. After becoming fed up with Excel I did some research online and found a solution.

My Computer
Tools
Folder Options
File Types
Choose XLSX (XLSX for 2007 or XLS for 2003)
Go to Advanced

Uncheck “browse in same window” in advanced window.

Then highlight Open
Edit

Make sure in the Action box it says &Open

Copy one of the following and paste into “application used to perform action” (Check whether current path has OFFICE11 or OFFICE12 then copy and paste one of the following:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE” “%1″

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\EXCEL.EXE” “%1″

Check the box next to use DDE

Remove anything that is in DDE Message box and DDE Application Not Running box.

Make sure the application box says: EXCEL

And in the Topic box it says: System

http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=234896&messageID=2510797

Thanks Jon.

Jonathan Oppelaar

A few day ago, Prof Andrew Kun, Andras Fekete and I visited the Intelligent Environments ‘08 Conference in Seattle, WA. An earlier post already introduced this conference on eceblogger. We presented three works there. Andras had a great poster on the deployment of his new P54 PDA software. The poster session took place in the afternoon of the first day. I think his work drew the biggest crowd.

Andras presented the PDA study with great confidence and answered the questions flawlessly. Besides him, I also presented my research results from the past year. I had two oral presentations. The first one was on the steering wheel sensor device. This was a mixture of a regular slide-show presentation and a demonstration. For this purpose we shipped out a scaled down version of our driving simulator equipped with the new sensor. Here, we are testing the system right before the the start of the presentation.

Luckily, none of the equipment got broken during transportation, so everything worked perfectly. My other presentation took place in the afternoon of the second day. It was on the results of the PTT glove experiment that we mentioned here before. This presentation also went smoothly.

The conference was organized very nicely, with helpful hosts and great food. They even scheduled a visit for us to see the Microsoft Home project. The location of the conference was on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. It proved to be a beautiful place. I didn’t even know that there are campuses in the USA that are built in gothic style. I have seen this before only in Europe. Here Andras and Andrew explore the square in front of the landmark library building of the university, that looks more like a gothic cathedral.

Thanks go to Prof Kun for helping us and actively participating in writing all three papers (second author on all of them). Also, thanks to Erika Clifford for doing all the logistics for the trip and shipping the equipment.

Oszkar

Students from the UNH Tech Camp recently visited the Project54 lab. These students ranged from 7th to 12th grade, and all but two were from New Hampshire. The camp is aimed to give young interested students a glimpse of the engineering and science world. The students were given a brief background of how P54 came together and how the system works. Lastly the students got a chance to use the lab car and drive the simulator, the pictures below are from the UNH Tech Camp’s visit.

Here, Oszkar Palinko explains how the eye tracker software and the simulator are used at P54.

Here, I explain to a student how the touch screen and voice command can be used to control P54.

This was the first annual UNH Tech Camp and it was great to see such a large turn out. It is always a good experience when you get to work with young students so interested in engineering. I look forward to the visits from the UNH Tech Camp in the future.

David Garneau

Hi Ecebloggers,

Around 2 weeks ago, I completed my summer internship at UNH. During a roughly two month timespan, I worked on how interacting with a keyboard and an attached display in the vehicle might effect the driver performance. At certain fixed locations, a text appeared on the screen for a few seconds and the subject was required to type that text using the keyboard. However, to make the study interesting, some events were designed that would be evoked when the subject would be diverted looking at the keyboard. One of the five designed events, which I call “A barrel falling from a truck”, was quite interesting. The name of the event itself indicates what actually happens during the event. A barrel from a moving truck would fall just short of the subject when he came close to the truck driving in the same lane. Here is a video that demonstrates the incident as it occurs in the Project54 driving simulator.

It was actually a little arduous to make a falling barrel look realistic as such a support is not provided in Hyperdrive , the software used for designing the scenarios. A barrel, as the ecebloggers might know, is a static entity. It was not possible to keep it in motion with the truck, a kinematic entity. I tried to create a barrel with dynamic properties and then relocate it along the roadway at a certain height above it. However, while Hyperdrive relocated the barrel along the roadway, the barrel could not be placed above the level of the roadway. A bug was noticed in Hyperdrive when the log files created indicated that the barrel was moved above the roadway level as well when actually it didn’t happen. I contacted Hyperdrive forums support and they clarified that all the kinematic and dynamic entities in the scenario were so designed to stay adhered to the roadway and such a displacement above the road was not possible for the barrel during the simulation.

To overcome this problem, I estimated the possible positions of the barrel, assuming it was in motion with the truck, and placed the barrels in midair at those specific coordinates. A script was then created to implement the planned scene. Initially, all the barrels placed in midair were made invisible and as the script progressed, the barrels were made to switch between visible and invisible states in a consecutive fashion to achieve synchronisation with the motion of the truck. Finally, when the subject came within a suitable distance relative to the truck, a separate set of barrels set for a projectile-like motion was triggered in the same visible and invisible fashion to achieve an appropriate declivity. Since the barrels that were pre-placed were limited and not certain,  the desired effect might not be obtained in case the number of barrels in midair reduced to zero when a subject approached the truck too slowly or he went on to a different lane. Thus, the person had to stay in that lane for achieving the desired effect, which otherwise, is quite a cool event to watch and enjoy.

Puneet Lakhanpal

Check out this post by Todd Bishop, and the very interesting video. It talks about the Microsoft Sphere, an adaptation of the multitouch Microsoft Surface to a spherical display, using Global Imagination hardware.

Andrew Kun