The title of my talk for NECHFES2008 student conference was “Multi-threaded spoken dialogs in hands-busy and eyes-busy environments: Human-human experiments”. That talk was mostly about our new experiments that we plan to run. We will use variation of a Twenty Questions game in our experiments. This game allows us to control the search space for the solutions and clear identification of adjacency pairs. I’ll be posting more information about the experiments later.

Thanks,

Alexander Shyrokov

Literature review is a big part of a scientific underatkening. Thanks to the Internet, most papers are available on line. This resulted (at least for me) in a big number of papers that I read and stored for feature references… Welcome to the age of data mining. As a researcher I have yet another problem on my hands: after I solved the problem of finding information, how do I keep track of it?

This subject was touched upon in other posts (bookmarking, mind maps, references). Given that my major focus of attention (at this moment) is my disertation, I want to be able to have a solution for referencing the information I have found. This basically has some sub-problems: creating references, searching through references, adding them to my documents (thesis, publications, reports), and creating list of references in my documents. I’ll skip discussion of why I was not satisfied with the above mentioned tools. Instead I’ll tell you what I see myself using: Zotero.

Long story short, this is a common scenario: I found a paper using Google Scholar (acm/ieee/etc). Two clicks and my reference is created (with all the author, title, abstract, etc. information added properly). Another click and I’m actually reading the paper. One last click and the pdf is stored with my reference (for feature review). If I found something interesting I can add notes. I can tag the reference (for feature searches). I also can link other references as related. The bottom line: creation of references is a smooth, easy and quick process.

There are plugins for OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word that allows one to use Zotero reference in the documents. The process of adding references to the text and creating refere lists is a two click deal (also smooth and quick). Installation of both plugins (for firefox and for Writer) was very simple.

For more information take a Zotero tour.

Alexander Shyrokov.

I came across an interesting paper Action video game modifies visual selective attention by C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier. The paper describes a few experiments designed to see the difference in visual attention of people who play action video games and people who do not. Interestingly enough:

…although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing.

This altering allows gamers to perform better on certain tasks.

Alexander Shyrokov

Hello ecebloggers.

Last week, from Monday 25th ’till Wednesday 27th of August, I went to Naturalistic Driving and Analyses Symposium at Virginia Tech Institute. Symposium was about naturalistic observation in driving. Simply said, naturalistic observation is unobtrusive observation of subjects in their natural environment. Tom Dingus, seen in the picture below, from Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) held the opening session and gave a brief overview of naturalistic driving methods and their role in driving safety.

Robert Skinner, in the picture below, TRB executive director, continued the opening session and talked about the importance of naturalistic driving research to highway safety. He discussed Tom Vanderbilt’s book “Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)” as one of the most important books in the filed of driver behavior.

Dan McGehee from the University of Iowa (in the picture below) conducted a very interesting research on critical events in driver behavior using event triggered video records.

In his study he wanted to find out what causes those critical events. The study was 52 weeks long, 6 weeks of baseline, 40 weeks of feedback and another 6 weeks for secondary baseline and involved 12 subjects. In that period of time 6000 events were recorded including 15 crashes and 25 near crashes. He found out that the most common reason for a critical event is improper speed for turns. Other events where reported, like abrupt braking due to snow.

One of more interesting talks for me was from Shane McLaughlin from VTTI (in the picture below) on data mining in cars.

He gave an overview on how to conduct successful data mining and challenges in doing that. Some of the challenges he mentioned are recognition of the data that might help the research, importance of being familiar with the data, and challenges in evaluation of the data.

The most interesting event on the symposium was demonstration of the Smart road. I’ll write more about that in my next post.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

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

Check out this article from Cognitive Daily on how to report on scientific research to a general audience. Note that many of the suggestions are equally valid when they’re applied to documents aimed at scientific or technical audiences (e.g. “Explaining your figures is crucial…”).

Andrew Kun

Ray Kurzweil is well known for his work on optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition. Recently, he was invited by the National Academy of Engineering to be part of a committee charged with outlining the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. Last Thursday, Ray gave a talk on this subject at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA, and four of my students and I went to hear him speak.

A good portion of the 2 hour talk was devoted to two ideas. One is that careful analysis of data can allow you to predict the growth of particular technologies. The second is that the growth of most, if not all, (successful) technologies is exponential. E.g., the number of Internet hosts has risen exponentially over the years (see slide below). Note that the slide tells us that this trend wasn’t perceptibly altered by the boom and bust of the dot-coms. Ray’s take on this: Wall Street didn’t realize that the Internet was growing exponentially, extrapolated the seemingly linear growth of the early exponential curve and came to the wrong conclusion that the Internet is not a viable place to make money.

The rest of the talk was devoted to several technologies that in Ray’s opinion will make a difference in the next 20-25 years (note that he prefers to talk about this shorter time horizon rather than the next century). One set of technologies is related to biology. To frame this discussion, it’s worth taking in this quote:

“As remarkable as biology is, it’s full of downsides, and needs to be improved upon.”

That’s the spirit! So how will we do this? Well, in Ray’s opinion, our computational powers are rising fast enough that by 2029 we’ll have computers that will be able to pass the Turing test (btw, this will be OK, we’ll use them to extend our own abilities and the whole thing will not result in some takeover by the machines). Our abilities to simulate biological processes are already very powerful, and will only get more powerful, which in turn will allow us to engineer new cures rapidly. We’re in the process of developing miniature robots to be deployed in our bodies to fight disease and generally make us stronger (e.g. provide us with an extra boost of oxygen). And we also need to develop a way to quickly respond to any viral outbreak (man-made or natural).

Ray also predicted that ubicomp will play a central role in our future, since we’ll be “online all the time with augmented reality.” This was fun to hear for my students and me, since our Project54 research relies heavily on the ubicomp field. And, talking about students, the topic of education also came up. Ray pointed out that “passion, desire and skill to learn is what we nan give our students.” Very well put.

Overall, the talk was inspirational. Now I want to read this book! Thanks Ray,

Andrew Kun

p.s. See more pictures from the event here - thanks Ivan!

Each year at UNH, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Seniors join with other engineering disciplines in the Undergraduate Research Conference (URC). Here they present their research projects that they have been working on for months, some even up to a year. This year, the projects range from renewable energy to digital imaging processing to audio noise canceling.

One interesting project was “InterFACE”, which utilizes digital image processing to track the movement of a face. It then uses that data to recreate the motion in a robotic head sculpture. The pictures below depicts their system design.

Another project which incorporated electrical design was the “Tidal Power Generation”. This project was a combined effort of the Mechanical, Ocean and Electrical Engineering Departments. Here the idea of utilizing tidal action, and the related currents, to convert into electrical power by way of a turbine was investigated.

Above we see the display of the system, as well as a demonstration of the theory behind the project.

Overall, the conference was exciting and impressive, and the Seniors really worked hard to put forth their best efforts. For both myself and Mark Taipan, we were especially excited due to our recent award of a SURF Grant for the summer of 2008 to work on our project Kingsbury Location Awareness System (KLAS). We will be presenting our project at the URC next year, and so it was very helpful to see this year’s projects which will help us plan our presentation for next year.

Matthew Lape

In the March issue of Spectrum, Robert Lucky writes about a report by the National Academies which indicates that the long-term prospects for US global competitiveness are threatened by trends in our educational system and our economy. Now the chairman of the committee responsible for this 2005 report, Norman Augustine, has written a shorter version of the report. You can download it here.

The trend in the US educational system that’s cause for concern is that our schools are not turning out sufficient numbers of students who have the math background to even consider engineering and science careers. The trend in research funding has been for industry to abdicate its responsibility for funding research and for the federal government to underfund research. According to Lucky, “industry now spends three times as much on litigation in the United States as it does on research.”

Why does all this matter? Because the prosperity we enjoy in the US is largely due to our economic power (I won’t get into discussions about political systems which clearly have a lot to do with prosperity). But our economic power is threatened by the troubling double trends of fewer engineers and scientists in the pipelines of our schools and pinched research funding. Our economic power needs nurturing and the way to nurture it is to improve K-12 education in math and sciences and to increase funding for research. (We at Project54 try to help out with K-12 education by hosting school groups: see e.g. this post and also this post.)

Btw, I think that one thing that our K-12 education could use is a decreased stress on organized sports. That should free up some money to pay good math (and music, English, science, art, etc.) teachers and time for students to study academic subjects. Physical activity is important and should be encouraged, but teams, cheerleaders, banners, away games… How exactly do they contribute to education? They’re pretty much just fun activities. Fun’s a good thing, but America’s K-12 students clearly need some help with their homework first.

Andrew Kun

Today, Jan 29, 2008, I was a participant in a psychology experiment which is trying to understand working memory. The experiment consisted of me sitting in front of a computer screen with head phones while different images with sounds appeared. Then one of the images and sounds would appear again and my jobs determine if anything was different. I experiment consisted of about 10 different set ups. Each setup had different combinations of images and sounds ( i.e. color balls and a tones, color balls and animal noises, Grey balls and tones, pictures of familiar things with tones, etc.)

Below are some excerpts from the debeifing.

“Past work has shown that visual modality can quickly ‘bind’ or associate different features with 3-4 objects, giving us the ability to detect changes int those objects after a short delay( Vogel, Woodman, and Luck 2001).”

“Data from this experiment will indicated whether associating features from different modalities (such as color and sound) takes more effort than associating features within one modality (such as color and position). Also, following on earlier research by Ceci and collegeues (1994), we will asses whether more recognizable real world objects such as bugs behave differently in working memory than abstract ones such as domes.”

~Jon Oppelaar