As Matt and Mike pointed out, several of the students here at Project54 attended the NECHFES 2008 Student Conference at Northeastern. Being from a suburb of Boston, it was nice to be in the city again and Northeastern served as a great venue for this conference. Several students from around New England (predominantly from the Boston area) presented and while each was interesting, there were a few presentations from other universities that especially captured my attention.
At Project54, we find that video demonstrations go a long way in describing the experiment, the problem, the environment, etc. One video from UMASS Lowell by T. Do showed the environment of a shrimp factory in Vietnam; it was interesting to see the human factors considerations (or lack thereof).
Another video by Romoser from UMASS Amherst showed the result of attaching a camera to a person’s head to show the amount of secondary looks taken while making turns. He showed that there are specific intervention techniques that can improve an older driver’s performance behind the wheel.
S. Gabree from Northeastern had one of the best short student presentations I have seen. His audience interaction displaying the adjustments our vision makes with contrast and color replacement was “eye opening” and fun! He and Zeljko both won the best student presentation awards given by the two sponsors of the conference (Aptima, Inc. and Charles River Analytics, Inc.). Congrats to you both! I sure have learned a lot from not just their presentations, but everyone’s. Be sure to check out the abstracts of the participants of the conference here. I sure hope that I have the opportunity to do this again. My thanks go out to Matt, Professor Kun, Oskar Palinko, the rest of Project54, and NECHFES for making this an enjoyable experience!