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

A couple of weeks ago I spent a day visiting Microsoft Research and gave a talk on our lab’s work on in-car speech user interfaces. My hosts were two Microsoft researchers, Tim Paek and Ivan Tashev. I was also accompanied by one of my graduate students, Oszkar Palinko.

As part of the visit Ivan gave us a tour of two Microsoft Research labs. First we visited the acoustic anechoic chamber. This was a really neat experience. Check out the video below in which Ivan introduces this lab.

While it’s impossible to show in a video how quiet it gets in the anechoic chamber, check out the following video which shows me clapping inside the chamber. You may be able to notice that there’s no echo (thus anechoic!). In the chamber you could also notice this just by listening to people and hearing the dramatic change in perceived speaking volume as they (or you) turned.

Ivan also showed us his newly installed driving simulator. The simulator is made by STI and Ivan plans to use it very soon in his ongoing work on Commute UX, a “telephone dialog system for location-based services.” Oszkar and I had a chance to test the simulator and some of the cool “traps” or scenarios in which a distracted driver may end up in an accident. Here’s a video of me testing the MSR driving simulator.

I uploaded some picture from this visit here.

Thanks Ivan for the tour and thanks to both Ivan and Tim for hosting.

Andrew Kun

My colleague, Zeljko Medenica and I are participating at this year’s Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems in Columbus, Ohio.

This is a very interesting event with lots of young speech researchers from all over the world. There are also representatives from different research and development companies interested in spoken dialog systems like: Microsoft Research, Nuance, VoiceObjects, AT&T, Toyota ITC, Harman/Becker, etc.

During the days of YRRSDS we have participated in several roundtable discussions, which covered some very interesting topics: multimodal systems, next killer-apps, dialog system develpoment, how to make spoken dialog systems human-like, etc.

More detailed description on the topics will be provided in future posts.

Zeljko and I also presented our posters which summarized our research interests. Participants were very interested in hearing about our experiments and results. This will also be discussed in future posts.

Columbus is a very nice city with a huge university campus OSU (biggest single campus in the USA), where the event took place. The organizers put a lot of effort in making this roundtable a very interesting one.

Oszkar Palinko and Zeljko Medenica

My colleague Andras Fekete and I had a chance to visit the Forney Museum of Transportation in Denver, on our journey with Dr. Miller and Dr. Kun to Colorado for the National Institute of Justice conference. The museum started as the private collection of Mr. J. D. Forney with only a few cars. Today, it is a unique historical collection of over 500 exhibits including antique cars, locomotives, buggies, unicycles, bicycles, motorcycles, rare, exotic, and concept vehicles. The most famous exhibits are: Amelia Earhart’s “Gold Bug” Kissel, Prince Aly Khan’s Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, the Brewster with a heart-shaped radiator, the Hispano Suiza, the Forney Locomotive, and the 4005 Big Boy – the world’s largest steam locomotive (how big it is you can see in the picture below). We were lucky to meet an engineer who had been operating one of the Big Boys and who, in the museum, shared his experience and passion about locomotives with us. The Big Boy was designed to operate at 80 mph with total weight of 1,189,500lb and producing a maximum of 6,290 horsepower. It is really impressive. Only 25 Big Boys were built ever, between 1941 and 1944, and only 8 of them still remain.

The only car in the museum in which we could sit in was the Model T. The model T was the first car produced on an assembly line designed by Ford which was the beginning of the automotive revolution which started in 1908. The Model T had economy of 13 to 21 mpg, 20.2 horsepower, and maximum speed of 40 to 45 mph. In 1927, when the last Model T was built, the Ford Motor Company was producing an automobile every 24 seconds. In the period between 1908 and 1927, more than 15 million Model T cars were built which “put America on wheels”. In the picture below, my colleague Andras and I are enjoying the Model T and for a moment pretending that we are at the beginning of the 20th century.

The museum is really impressive with its huge and unique historical collection of vehicles of all kinds. It is a perfect place to visit for all fans of cars and history. We had a pleasant time and all custodians were more than polite. You can find more pictures from the museum here.

Ivan Elhart & Andras Fekete

So a couple weeks ago, my colleague Ivan Elhart and I got to join Dr.Miller and Dr.Kun on a journey to Colorado for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) conference. What can I say, it was a fabulous time. We arrived on Wednesday at 11pm (local time), so we just had time to grab some really late dinner, then head to bed. Thursday morning from 9am-12pm was the demonstration time, where TWG members were to walk around to each exhibit and take notes. Well, towards the end, it was actually cut short which made last minute rush through presentations even more hectic.
All in all, I was pretty pleased with our booth. In the morning, we got up early, and set everything up. As you can see here, we were pretty eager to get started.

Here we are all set up with the Project25 demo on the left (presented by Dr.Miller and Ivan), and the handheld demo on the right (by Dr.Kun and myself).

Ivan took some pretty good pictures during the demonstration. The room was pretty small with all the equipment and people walking around I was glad I didn’t need to wear a formal jacket.

After the demo session, the 15 minute presentations of people’s demonstrations started. There were some pretty interesting projects explained in more detail. Dr.Kun’s presentation was the next day, so we got to sit around, relax and enjoy other’s presentations.
On Friday, Dr.Kun gave his talk on the research we do here. It was tough presenting effectively, because of the limit of 1 slide for the presentation which could be divided into 4 subsections. Thus effectively reducing the distance the slides could be clearly seen from, and in essence bringing down the usefulness of the slide itself.

Other than these small details, the conference was enjoyable. The food was good, the hotel rooms were nice. Boulder is a beautiful city, for those of you who have never been there, I strongly suggest you go. Ivan and I stayed an extra few days to enjoy some snowboarding in the mountains about 1hr from Boulder.
Overall, it was a good time, and it was very educational for (I think) all of us.

András Fekete & Ivan Elhart

On the last day of the past semester (12.21.07), Alex Shyrokov and I paid a visit to Northeastern University’s Intelligent Human-Machine Systems Lab. This was a follow-up meeting to the contact we established with fellow researchers last fall on the NECHFES Student Conference. We were very interested in finding out about the sensored SmartWheel that they developed. It has many similarities with our sensored steering wheel. Our hosts were Hua Cai and Hongjie Leng, who kindly demonstrated us their system.

Hua Cai (NEU), Hongjie Leng (NEU), Oskar Palinko (UNH)

As it can be seen on the above image, the simulator consists of a driving seat, steering wheel, pedals and a computer screen. Both the software and hardware were developed at Northeastern. The university has a larger, higher fidelity simulator too in a neighboring lab, which was inaccessible at the time. The two simulators can be connected, so two drivers can interact in the same scenario.

The steering wheel has a number of sensors on its surface: blood volume pulse (infra-red), skin conductance, skin temperature and gripping force sensors. To be able to measure these variables, it is necessary that the drivers hold the steering wheel at exact positions, i.e. to align the fingertips with the sensor positions. The grip must not be too hard, otherwise the data gets noisy.

The multi-modal system even incorporates sensors in the seat belt: one for strain and another one for bending. The strain sensor picks up breathing cycle signals while the bending sensors can indicate possible accidents.

I would like to thank our hosts for letting us explore their system and for answering all of our questions. The exchanged knowledge will surely benefit both sides.

Oszkar Palinko

Hello, my name is Zeljko Medenica and I am a research assistant with Project54. I am working on human-computer voice interactions in vehicles and this post is about one of the experiments that I conducted in our lab.

Probably everybody knows how many electronic devices police officers have in their cruisers. Although they are very important in their everyday work, they are also a potential source of distraction. The reason is that most of these devices have manual hardware controls that require taking one’s hand off the wheel and eyes off the road, which increases the likelihood of crashes.

Last year professor Kun and I performed an experiment regarding the effects of different user interfaces on driving performance. The experiment was based on the interaction with a mobile police radio. We compared the effects of this interaction while using the manual controls installed on the radio and the Project54 speech-user interface. The results were very important. They showed that the manual interaction significantly influenced driving performance, while the speech interaction did not. On the video below you can see examples of how the manual and the Project54 speech-user interfaces were used during the experiment and what their influence was on driving performance.

Using these results we wrote a paper “Comparing the Influence of Two User Interfaces for Mobile Radios on Driving Performance” which was accepted for publication at the Driving Assessment 2007 conference. The conference will be held in Stevenson, WA from 9 – 14^th of July. I am especially excited about this conference because this is my very first paper. I am looking forward to it and I will have some more posts after the conference is over.

Zeljko Medenica