A week ago Mike, Mark, Eric and me attended another NEC-HFES student research conference in Boston. It is an annual event where students from different areas of human-factors engineering have a chance to present their work and share their thoughts and ideas with other people. This time the conference was held at MIT’s Stata building.

We were very pleased to see that the quality of presented research increases every year. It is definitely the case that this conference is gaining on popularity as the number of participating universities rises. This year I was pleasantly surprised to see how many driving simulator related studies were presented. In the picture below you can see me while presenting my work.

As always, there was a very interesting keynote speaker. This year it was Dr. David Aurelio. He gave an interesting overview of his career and how he got into the area of human-factors. He also demonstrated some of the specific applications that he worked on for different companies over the years. His most recent experience was with the design of sound systems and in the picture below you can see a demonstration of the remote controller that he designed.

In general this was an interesting experience, and we are looking forward to it next year.

Zeljko Medenica

Last Friday, a few of us from P54 attended a day long student conference geared towards human factors and ergonomics. The conference was very interesting, showcasing about 20 presentations dealing with various fields. Three of us from P54 (only ones from NH) gave presentations on our current research. I gave my presentation on our research on the multitouch display with geotagged & oriented photos.

It was a valuable experience for me, since I have not yet given a presentation to so many people whom I did not know. Of course, I was nervous at first, but it went away as my presentation started, and went well overall. I’m sure I will have to make more of these types of presentations in the future, so it was very good practice. Aside from my presentation, I also enjoyed a lot of other things from the conference. One of the other presentations was focused on controlling fully automated search and destroy robots in the field, and how often the person controlling them should reassess the goals and priorities of the robots.

Also the girl in the picture (one of three presenting) had an amazing voice. We all agreed she should be on radio or something, or a professional presenter. Mark and Zelijko gave awesome presentations too, and we all enjoyed some Friday evening rush hour traffic from Boston. It was great!

Mike Litchfield

As my colleagues Zeljko and Mike have already blogged about, we attended the 2009 Ubiquitous Computing Conference in Orlando, Florida. It was a very interesting gathering with some vanguard research topics. For me, the one-minute madness was a new and exciting experience. Poster authors have to present their research in a single minute. At prior conferences I observed two distinct classes of one-minute presentations: serious ones and funny ones. The purpose of the first class is obvious, while the second type tries to convince people to visit the poster stand by using some witty slides and usually an open question that would be answered at the time of visit. For this conference I decided to try my luck with the funny presentation. Here are my slides, so you can judge for yourself:

The following text accompanies the slides:

Slide2: Everyone likes to take fun vacation pictures.
Slide3: But an hour long slide show of these pictures might not be as much fun for your friends as it is for you.
Slide4: So how can you stop your friends from falling asleep? We propose a new storytelling environment which integrates 3 new technologies: GPS enabled smart phones, virtual globe applications and multitouch interaction.
Slide5: This environment could create a much more enjoyable user experience for your friends compared to a slide show. It might even be the killer app for multitouch!
Slide6: If you would like to know more about our research please come by to see our poster and hear about some much more serious applications.

Acknowledements to Hyomin Kim and Alex Vapirev for their great acting skills shown in the slides.

Here you can also see the layout of our poster. If you click on it, a larger view will appear.

Let me know if you have any comments on the presentation and poster. Thanks!

Oszkar

Given that the fall has already started, is there a better place for a conference than Florida? Just a couple of days ago professor Kun, Mike, Oskar and I came back from UbiComp2009, which was held in Orlando, FL. The conference was very interesting with lots of participants from all over the world.

One new thing that I haven’t had a chance to experience myself at a conference before is the “one minute madness” session. The purpose of this session is to make it possible for all poster presenters to introduce their work in a relatively short period of time. This way, all participants get an overall impression about the available topics and can decide in advance which poster presentations they would like to attend later.

This time I presented a poster about a pilot study where we explored in-car augmented reality navigation aids (see picture below). Just briefly, in this experiment we compared a standard navigation aid with a head-up display (HUD) augmented reality (AR) navigation aid regarding driving performance and visual attention. The purpose of the HUD AR navigation aid is to project the navigation route directly on the windshield, so that no distraction caused by looking at the in-car display would take place. Our preliminary results show that there is no difference in driving performance, but there is a significant difference regarding visual attention in favor of HUD AR. We are currently working on extending this study further and exploring other possibilities (such as head-down display AR aid), so more posts about this topic will follow soon. And hopefully more conferences too…

This summer, Oskar, Ankit, Professor Kun, and I had a poster submission accepted at the Ubicomp 2009 conference. Unfortunately Ankit could not make it, since he was back in India for school. The rest of us and Zeljko attended the conference. During the conference, there was a 2 hour period where Posters, Videos, and Demos were displayed. During this time, Oskar and I, stood by the poster and presented our project to any interested attendees, and there were plenty. Zeljko stood nearby at his own poster. It was a great learning experience, to interact with the other researchers and present our work to them. The other attendees also had some good advice on other areas our project could be applied, or projects with similar goals that might be helpful. Oskar and I also took turns ‘manning the post(er)’ so that we could each see the other projects on display. Below is a picture of an interested researcher at our poster.

Overall, the conference was really awesome, and it was great to experience both the research presentations and community.

Mike Litchfield

Hello ecebloggers,

Over the past semester Andrew Kun, Tim Paek, Zeljko Medenica, Oskar Palinko, and I have been investigating the influence of Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) on driving. Nowadays these devices are widespread in vehicles. They typically display the real-time location of the vehicle on a map and play spoken prompts when drivers need to turn. While such devices are less distracting than paper directions, their graphical display may distract users from their primary task of driving.

We have conducted experiments in our high fidelity driving simulator to see the influence of two PNDs on driving:

• the influence of a standard PND, with a combined visual (electronic map) and spoken output,
  
• and the influence of a PND with spoken output only.

The first goal of the experiments was to find out if a PND with combined output causes drivers to spend less time looking on the road ahead than a PND with spoken output only. The second goal was to examine the effects of glancing at the PND’s visual display on driving performance. We hypothesized that a PND with combined output will influence the percent dwell time (PDT) on the outside world negatively when compared to the PND with spoken output only, i.e. drivers will be more distracted by it. Our second hypothesis was that PND’s visual display will influence negatively on the driving performance. We expected an increase in the lane position and steering wheel angle variances to occur whenever drivers look away from the road.

The experiment results showed that our hypotheses were correct:

• We found that drivers using a navigation system with a graphical display indeed spent less time looking at the road compared to those using a navigation system with spoken directions only.
• Glancing at the display was correlated with higher variance in driving performance measures.

The video below shows how the PND’s visual display influences driving performance.

With respect to designing in-car navigation aids, our results seem to suggest that if users can trust a PND enough to follow the spoken directions they are given, even when they are lost, a navigation system with no visual display may be the most favorable option since visual attention and consequently driving performance will likely be improved.

This work will be presented at the AutomtoiveUI2009 conference.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

During the fourth week of June 2009, the biannual Driving Assessment conference was held at the beautiful Big Sky Resort, Montana. This is one of the most important driving related conferences. Andrew Kun and I had a poster presentation here, with the following title: Comparison of the Effects of Two Push-to-Talk Button Implementations on Driver Hand Position and Visual Attention. The poster session went very well with lots of interested visitors.

There were also many other interesting presentations and posters. Most of the participants came from North America and interestingly, Sweden. Also, driving assessment related companies were present. Realtime Technologies and SeeingMachines showed a new feature of the RTI simulator, which allows constant monitoring of the object in the simulation at which the driver is looking at.

The nature around Big Sky is beautiful. It is primarily a ski center, but there is plenty to see during the summer too. Its proximity to Yellowstone National Park gives it even more value.

Oszkar

On Wednesday June 3rd the New Hampshire EPSCoR Conference and Proposal Writing Workshop was held at the Common Man Inn in Plymouth, NH.

EPSCoR stands for Experimental Project to Stimulate Competitive Research, which is not very descriptive of its purpose. The goal of this huge project is to stimulate research in science and engineering in states of the USA, which have lower concentration of research funding than others. Since 2004, New Hampshire also participates in this program. It was started as a project of the NSF (National Science Foundation) but since then other government agencies have also implemented their EPSCoR initiatives (e.g. NASA EPSCoR). As it is known, the NSF and similar institutions provide some of the most important funds for research in the country, therefore EPSCoR is also of vital importance for research labs as ours, Project54.

The conference featured a number of NSF officials who presented the most important funding aids that their institution provides. Dr. Uma Venkateswaran, the national Program Director of NSF EPSCoR gave an introductory presentation, talking about the ways they can help fund research labs in New Hampshire. The main vehicles of funding are Research Infrastructure Improvement, Co-funding with NSF Directorates and Conference and Workshop Funding.

After her, officials of different NSF Directorates held presentations of their fields. For us the most important might be the presentation of Dr. Suzanne Iacono from the CISE Directorate (Computer and Information Science and Engineering). Among other topics, she mentioned the Human Centered Computing initiative at her Directorate which funds projects aiming to improve usability and introduce human values into interaction with computers. Our work on researching in-car user interfaces, handhelds and mutitouch surfaces shares many common ideas with this program.

It is important to mention that NSF provides funding through a grant system awarded to successful proposals. The success rate of proposals is only 25% percent, but as we figured out at the conference one can improve his/her chances by elaborately studying all of NSF’ guidelines and the vast number of different programs. I found the conference to be very informative. It was also very encouraging to hear, that so much is invested in advancing science and technology in the US.

Oszkar

On Monday, May 11, I was honored to present my work at a very prestigious IEEE conference on Homeland Security technologies, held in Waltham, MA. During the technical session on the interoperability and field deployable communications, I gave a presentation on the design and development of a software defined Project 25 data base station. Here is a picture taken during my presentation:

First, I took a couple minutes to introduce data communication and talk about potential benefits of having data messages in public safety communication system. I continued my presentation by talking about the problem of very expensive Project 25 equipment that hinders the implementation of data communication in small police departments. Our approach towards a software defined data base station seems a promising and cost effective way for local departments to bring data messages into their cruisers. A very precise and rigorous testing procedure performed in our laboratory showed the compliance of the base station with commercially available P25 radio equipment. Also, the test procedure produced promising and encouraging results prior the real world deployment in a local NH police department. Finally, I concluded my presentation with a demo video which demonstrates an application of querying a remote server using the data base station and Project54’s speech user interface. Here are the slides:

After the presentation I answered a few great questions and received a lot of positive comments about our work on the radio interoperability at UNH and Project54.

Special thanks to Dan Farfan from KinetX Inc., who was so kind to take pictures of me presenting.

Ivan Elhart

After the 2009 Undergraduate Research Conference at UNH the university newspaper featured not less than three Project54 undergrad students on its front page in the headline article.

Dave Garneau was part of the UNH Precision Racing Team, which won the first prize on the conference. Dave designed the traction control system for the racer. As previously reported, Mattew Lape and Mark Taipan developed the impressive Kingsbury Location Awareness System, which can help students find their way around university buildings.

Matt, Mark and Dave have defended their senior projects at this conference as they prepare to graduate from UNH this May. Nice work guys! You have surely showed that you can be called engineers from now on. Good luck in your future careers!

Oszkar