An interesting poster was presented by Mark Micire from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and Brenden Keyes from Mitre Corp. at last week’s IUI’09 Conference. It dealt with using a multi-touch table to control a mobile robot agent. Multi-touch displays are getting more prominent in different interaction tasks. Here, a physical system is controlled using a highly virtual interface, unlike a joystick, which uses physical motion to control a moving agent.

Mark and his colleagues used a Mitsubishi DiamondTouch display developed at MERL. Unlike our multi-touch table, this one features front projection and capacitive sensors. Front projection allows the system to be placed closer to the ground, but users can occlude the projection with their hands. Our back projection system needs more space in the back, but is not affected by occlusion. In the MERL system, the receiving circuit is located under each user (in the chair or under the feet), which allows the users to be identified by position at the table, but needs a closed circuit through the chair or under the feet.

The research showed that a new user interface can be used by different subjects in different, sometimes unexpected, ways. While the designers wanted to create a ‘virtual joystick’, the users have found analogies with different devices: mouse track-pads, piano keys, touch-typing, steering wheel, etc. This research is great in pioneering novel applications for multi-touch displays.

Oszkar

Recently, I’ve been working on a small project that allowed me to take high quality pictures of any small object such as a PDA or cell phone. I built the light box, which allows me to control the amount of light that enters the area of the object I’m trying to take a picture of.

The light box was easy to make, the supplies required include a cardboard box, tracing or tissue paper, tape and possibly some posterboard. The cost is definitely under $10, and depends on what supplies you have laying around already. I got the instructions on how to build the project online. One interesting feature is the use of white posterboard behind and under the object, which allows for the “infinity sweep” look shown below.

Using the “infinity sweep” gives the object a very professional look. The light box is appealing for taking pictures of PDAs and cell phones because limiting the light allows you to reduce the glare on the screen of the device. The light box is a wonderful, cheap project that can drastically improve pictures taken for a multitude of uses. Oszkar has posted several of my other pictures on flickr.

Mike Litchfield

On Tuesday UNH CEPS faculty gathered for a roundtable discussion on navigating the process of submitting research proposals to various federal agencies. The event was organized by Janet Campbell, Associate Dean for Research, and it featured eight panelists. Each panelist was charged with saying a few words about successful strategies for getting funding from a particular federal agency. Janet invited me to be a panelist and address proposals to the US DOJ as our Project54 funding comes primarily from this agency.

The event was very interesting as all of the panelists had interesting observations and suggestions. Julie Bryce talked about proposals to NSF. She pointed out that faculty should pay attention to the divisions of undergraduate education (DUE) and of graduate education (DGE). Funding through these divisions is a natural match for folks like us who wear two hats: educator and researcher. Julie also recommended using the customizable NSF email updates which provide information on upcoming solicitations, deadlines, events, etc.

Ben Chandran discussed submitting proposals to NASA. He emphasized that the proposal has to convince the review panel that the problem addressed by the proposal and the proposed approach are valid and important. He pointed out that, while review panels consist of specialists in the general area of the proposal, none of the people on the panel are likely to be specialists in the exact area the proposal addresses. We as proposal writers have to take this into account as we are to convincingly argue for funding.

The final panelist of the roundtable event was Beth Turner, a program manager at NOAA. In addition to providing a slew of practical advice for the aspiring grant recipient, I’m happy to say that she confirmed my suggestion that having a good presence on the web is important - this is a good way to get yourself onto a review panel for example. Beth also talked about the value of poster sessions for networking.

Other panelists participating were Amitava Bhattacharjee who discussed DoE funding, Denny Chasteen, who has a perfect record (!) with NIH funding, Tom Lippmann, who talked about working with ONR and Jo Daniel, who I have to catch up with in order to get her advice on DoT funding.

The event was very well attended (30+) and I certainly enjoyed it a great deal. Thanks Janet for organizing! Also, you can find more pictures from the event on Flickr.

Andrew Kun

Yesterday brought an inspiring talk by Jun Rekimoto, the director of the Interaction Lab at Sony CSL and Professor at the University of Tokyo. The topic of the talk was Sensonomy, a new term coined by Jun which fuses Folksonomy with wireless sensor networks.

The basic idea behind Sensonomy is to integrate the virtual and real world environments. For this, determining the location of the user is of particular importance. Jun has found, that using WiFi for this purpose gives very good results in urban areas. Their research was tested in Tokyo, where there is more than one million WiFi access points! Check out this map. All of these points can be used to determine the location of the user. Here, Mr. Rekimoto compares the quality of GPS position determination vs. WiFi in downtown Tokyo.

It can be seen that the WiFi red line is usually more precise than the GPS black line. WiFi can also be used indoors unlike GPS and it has a much shorter startup time for determining location.

They call this technology the PlaceEngine. Anyone who downloads the client can use it to determine their location while they are online. This technology was used in their lifelogging application. Further information on this can be found at the web site of Mr. Rekimoto’s lab, which is partly in English. Check it out, it’s really interesting.

Furthermore, this research connects very well to the KLAS project which was developed by Mark Taipan and Matt Lape at our lab, Project54. They have used WiFi for determining indoor location. It seems that it is not impossible to take the system out of Kingsbury Hall and “wire up” the whole UNH campus!

Oszkar Palinko

Trevor Darrell a distinguished professor from UC Berkeley gave a very interesting invited talk yesterday at IUI’09 on the role of image processing in making user interfaces more intelligent.

He elaborated on the state-of-the-art of image recognition. There are essentially two categories of this field: 1) instance level recognition and 2) category level retrieval. The first category is almost a solved problem, while the second one sill causes headaches to scientists: how could computers recognize that a bar stool and a rocking chair belong to the same category?

Trevor also showed a few new cutting edge technologies that are starting to change our everyday life. For example, the SnapTell application for smartphones can recognize snapshots of book covers, CDs, etc. made with your cameraphone and find the product on the internet. The goal of this program is of course commercial, to sell the items that you are looking for. But such applications can also enable you to find out more about e.g. a new movie, based on a snapshot of its poster or even a TV advertisement.

This idea seems relevant to the work of my colleague, Michael Farrar, at Project54. His photo tagging application could be further improved to enable location, object or even suspect recognition (in the long run) for police officers.

Oszkar Palinko

Hello Everyone,

Yesterday, on February 8th 2009, I gave a presentation at the Multimodal Interfaces for Automotive Applications workshop, at this years Intelligent User Interfaces Conference. The title of my presentation was: Effects of Different Push-To-Talk Solutions on Subjective Driver Satisfaction.

The presentation went very well. The listeners seemed to have a great connection with the topic of driving simulation and various in-car user interfaces. They asked me a lot of very relevant questions after the presentation. Luckily, we have thought of most of the issues raised here, beforehand, during our research. On the other hand, we have received some very good ideas for directing our further research. The workshop chair, Christian Mueller suggested to explore usages of our wireless glove for a wider range of purposes in the car other than for PTT. Jacques Terken proposed the usage of visual gestures in activating the listening phase of speech recognition.

Also, Fan Yang of OGI gave a very good presentation at this workshop on Understanding Multi-Tasking Dialogue For Automotive Applications. Our Alex Shyrokov and Andrew Kun were appearing as the authors on this paper, which introduces some of our driving experiments on analyzing multi-threaded dialogues.

This year’s conference is held at the the beautiful Sanibel Island, Florida. The variety and beauty of wildlife and nature is really amazing here. Also, a setting Sun over the Gulf of Mexico provides a stunning vista for any viewer.

Be sure to check back to Ecebogger in the coming days for more reports on the IUI Conference.

Oszkar Palinko

Two new SeeingMachines eye trackers have arrived to the P54 lab. They have successfully survived their long trip from Australia in their well rugged cases.

We have already one eye tracker from the same company installed in our driving simulator. This tracker has provided us with lots of interesting new data on driver behavior. Some of the results of the eye tracker usage can be found in my Master’s Thesis. We have also submitted two papers for conferences with data from the eye tracker. We also have a number of prototype experiments designed using the tracker.

With the two new systems we hope to
1) increase the quality of tracking in the simulator
2) have one system installed in a real car for naturalistic driving experiments
3) use one system part-time on different other devices for user interface research

The quality of eye tracking in the simulator can be increased with additional systems that can be connected using the faceLAB Link application. Installing cameras near a GPS screen or near the central console will give us more precise tracking information on these locations.

Two eye trackers’ output can be integrated into a single stream of data using faceLAB Link, which is a part of the faceLAB package. The computers of these eye trackers must be connected via network, and faceLAB must be running on both of them. After that, faceLab Link can be started on one of them. It automatically recognizes all trackers on the network. There is no need for separate calibration, because the application calculates the location of the two eye trackers automatically, when they are tracking the same face. When the data is fused together, it can be found in Link’s logging folder instead of the faceLAB logging folder. In order to have correct object intersection data, the data streams must be ‘re-coded’ using WorldView (another application in the package). This must be done, because the ’slave’ eye tracker cannot produce gaze intersections with the virtual world objects of the ‘master’ tracker. But loading Link’s logged data and the world model of the ‘master’ system, and then re-coding it by pressing on the ‘record’ button, produces object intersections of the integrated data stream with the master’s world model. The output of this re-coding is recorded in WorldView’s logging folder.

We are very excited to use these systems in our research. The results of these experiments will be published on this site, so check back soon.

Oszkar Palinko