As part of his visit Tim gave a talk on his research in the field of mobile speech interaction. The talk covered three topics. First, Tim discussed his work on the Voice Command. Tim worked on utilizing user models to reduce the semantic error rate. Next, he talked about using reinforcement learning in a voice enabled browser. Finally, Tim talked about a mobile voice search application. The application provides intuitive ways to help the search application find the right answer. One way this is accomplished is by allowing multimodal refinements to the search. E.g. the user can help the speech recognizer by typing in the first letters of a problem word in an utterance. Another way is by allowing uncertain queries in the search (you can say “something” as part of the search to indicate you’re not sure what the exact search term should be). As part of the talk Tim gave a live demo of the mobile voice search application:
The talk was very interesting and the demo was impressive - thanks Tim! For more pictures click here.
As many of you may know, I spent a good part of the summer in front of the video-editing computer transcribing data from videos of experiments. I used Adobe Premiere to organize and view the videos. However, Adobe Premiere was made for movie/cinematic editing, not data transcription, so I had to “invent” a few ways to import and export the data. I also found a few problems/bugs, so I wrote all of this up in a document which can be found here. I structured this as a sort of FAQ on using Premiere, so I also added some basic (yet vital) processes that took me a while to figure out (like capturing video and exporting videos). Enjoy!
I have recently realized that when I open multiple documents in Excel they all show up separately on Taskbar but show up in the same window of Excel. This can be very aggravating for anyone who works with multiple documents and multiple monitors. After becoming fed up with Excel I did some research online and found a solution.
My Computer
Tools
Folder Options
File Types
Choose XLSX (XLSX for 2007 or XLS for 2003)
Go to Advanced
Uncheck “browse in same window” in advanced window.
Then highlight Open
Edit
Make sure in the Action box it says &Open
Copy one of the following and paste into “application used to perform action” (Check whether current path has OFFICE11 or OFFICE12 then copy and paste one of the following:
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.
Students from the UNH Tech Camp recently visited the Project54 lab. These students ranged from 7th to 12th grade, and all but two were from New Hampshire. The camp is aimed to give young interested students a glimpse of the engineering and science world. The students were given a brief background of how P54 came together and how the system works. Lastly the students got a chance to use the lab car and drive the simulator, the pictures below are from the UNH Tech Camp’s visit.
Here, Oszkar Palinko explains how the eye tracker software and the simulator are used at P54.
Here, I explain to a student how the touch screen and voice command can be used to control P54.
This was the first annual UNH Tech Camp and it was great to see such a large turn out. It is always a good experience when you get to work with young students so interested in engineering. I look forward to the visits from the UNH Tech Camp in the future.
Around 2 weeks ago, I completed my summer internship at UNH. During a roughly two month timespan, I worked on how interacting with a keyboard and an attached display in the vehicle might effect the driver performance. At certain fixed locations, a text appeared on the screen for a few seconds and the subject was required to type that text using the keyboard. However, to make the study interesting, some events were designed that would be evoked when the subject would be diverted looking at the keyboard. One of the five designed events, which I call “A barrel falling from a truck”, was quite interesting. The name of the event itself indicates what actually happens during the event. A barrel from a moving truck would fall just short of the subject when he came close to the truck driving in the same lane. Here is a video that demonstrates the incident as it occurs in the Project54 driving simulator.
It was actually a little arduous to make a falling barrel look realistic as such a support is not provided in Hyperdrive , the software used for designing the scenarios. A barrel, as the ecebloggers might know, is a static entity. It was not possible to keep it in motion with the truck, a kinematic entity. I tried to create a barrel with dynamic properties and then relocate it along the roadway at a certain height above it. However, while Hyperdrive relocated the barrel along the roadway, the barrel could not be placed above the level of the roadway. A bug was noticed in Hyperdrive when the log files created indicated that the barrel was moved above the roadway level as well when actually it didn’t happen. I contacted Hyperdrive forums support and they clarified that all the kinematic and dynamic entities in the scenario were so designed to stay adhered to the roadway and such a displacement above the road was not possible for the barrel during the simulation.
To overcome this problem, I estimated the possible positions of the barrel, assuming it was in motion with the truck, and placed the barrels in midair at those specific coordinates. A script was then created to implement the planned scene. Initially, all the barrels placed in midair were made invisible and as the script progressed, the barrels were made to switch between visible and invisible states in a consecutive fashion to achieve synchronisation with the motion of the truck. Finally, when the subject came within a suitable distance relative to the truck, a separate set of barrels set for a projectile-like motion was triggered in the same visible and invisible fashion to achieve an appropriate declivity. Since the barrels that were pre-placed were limited and not certain, the desired effect might not be obtained in case the number of barrels in midair reduced to zero when a subject approached the truck too slowly or he went on to a different lane. Thus, the person had to stay in that lane for achieving the desired effect, which otherwise, is quite a cool event to watch and enjoy.
Check out this post by Todd Bishop, and the very interesting video. It talks about the Microsoft Sphere, an adaptation of the multitouch Microsoft Surface to a spherical display, using Global Imagination hardware.
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.
Jamaicans are very proud with their high schools. In the 60’s Jamaica didn’t have as many high schools as it has today. Students from different parishes (parish is like a province, Jamaica has 14 parishes) were given a choice to go to two or three high schools. As our taxi driver told us the story, he himself had to take an hour and a half ride by bus to get to the school. He’s from a Hanover parish and there are two of the oldest and most respected high schools on the island: Rusea’s (in the picture below) and Manning’s.
The traditional colors of the Rusea’s high school are yellow, blue and green. Originally this school could admit roughly 100 students per year. Over the time the need for higher education in Jamaica forced the school to expand and now it has two campuses and admits more students. I was surprised when I heard that this high school was founded in 1777 (see picture below).
Students who graduate from this school are very respected on the island because it’s not easy to get in. Usually they continue their education.
Rusea’s High School gave one very famous and world wide known athlete: Marlene Ottey (in the picture below).
In the list of all time athletes Merlene Ottey is ranked fourth in 100 meter track and third in 200 meter track.
She holds the record for being the oldest track medalist ever and for winning the most women’s World Championship medals (14). Because of her achievements she is called “Queen of the Track”.
As a part of Project54, we have a newly formed Radio Testing Lab which is used for performing tests on projects related to the usage of Land Mobile Radios. Currently we are working on two projects that attempt to solve problems associated with the utilization of mobile radios. While the first project provides a solution for the interoperability problem using radio patching, the second project is based on the implementation of APCO Project 25 radio standard.
In the lab, for test equipment, we have more than fifteen radios made by different manufacturers (Motorola, Kenwood, and E. F. Jonson), several digital phosphor oscilloscopes (Tektronix TDS3000B series), a vector signal analyzer (Agilent 89441A with RF section), and a bunch of PCs and laptops. With this equipment and our experience we can assure that our projects are well tested and verified. Below are two pictures from the lab.
Using the radio patching method, we have developed a solution for the radio interoperability problem. It is based on more affordable off-the-shelf devices and represents an adequate solution for small public agencies. The system supports full radio patching with proper PTT functioning and has audio signal latency bellow what is specified by ITU-T standard. It turned out that radio patching is the cheapest and fastest solution to the radio interoperability problem. More information about the system can be found in this technical report, and here about its precursor system.
Project 25 seems a perfect solution to constant growing needs for data communications in cruisers because it supports both data and voice transmissions over radio channels. Also, most public safety agencies already have and use Project 25 compliant radios. However, in order to fully utilize their radios and Project 25 data capabilities those agencies have to purchase very expensive Project 25 data capable base stations. Small public safety agencies usually cannot afford such expensive pieces of equipment. To address this problem, we have developed a software-based Project 25 data base station as an affordable way for small agencies to bring the data into their cruisers. The project is in its final testing stage and very soon will be ready for deployment. You can read more about our base station in this previous post. More technical information about the implementation of the transmission side can be found in Eric’s thesis.
