MUSIC TECHNOLOGY
Location: GVU Cafe
Tablatron: A Box With an Ear for Tabla
Demo Description: Tabla is one of the most sophisticated percussion instruments in the world. We present a computer system that can listen to a tabla performance, analyze the sounds and rhythms produced, and respond as a virtual musician. The project demonstrates the application of a realtime machine learning system.
Faculty: Parag Chordia, ppc@gatech.edu
Student: Alex Rae
Flou: A 3D Environment for Musical Composition and Performance
Demo Description: The audio software used by everyone from recording studio gurus to garageband hobbyists still relies on a user interface that grew out of analog cassette decks. This project offers a novel, three-dimensional environment for real-time mixing and manipulation of sound objects, exploring how new interfaces can expand the ways in which we create, remix, compose, and perform music.
Faculty: Jason Freeman, jason.freeman@music.gatech.edu
Students: Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, Sriram Viswanathan
Bluetaps
Demo Description: The Bluetaps project explores how new generation smart-phones can be utilized as powerful and expressive musical controllers.
Faculty: Gil Weinberg, gilw.gatech.edu
Students: Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Thomas Smyth, Sriram Viswanathan
Mobile Music Touch (MMT)
Demo Description: The loss of functionality of the hands can severely interrupt a person's life, and hand rehabilitation can be a long, arduous process. In fact, many patients find certain traditional therapy exercises, such as squeezing an object for several hours a day, or other simple strengthening exercises, monotonous and un-motivating. Thus we propose the Mobile Music Touch (MMT) system as an engaging, pervasive hand rehabilitation aid. MMT consists of a wireless tactile glove, with a vibration motor for each finger, and a lightweight computing device such as an MP3 player or a smart phone. When instrumental music is played (such as piano or saxophone), the tactile glove vibrates the fingers to indicate which fingers play which notes.
Thus with MMT, users can hear a song and feel it playing on their hands. The MMT system can augment the stimulation of the afferent (sensory) nerves, motivate patients to use their hands in a fun way, and teach them the enjoyable and relaxing skill of playing an instrument, which may further motivate long term hand use. http://gtcmt.gatech.edu/
Faculty: Ellen Do; Thad Starner
Student: Kevin Huang
SYNAESTHETIC MEDIA LAB
Location: 209
BDC: emBodied Digital Creativity
Demo Description: We are building an experimental video-game system in two steps. In the first step, we seek to transfer a person's own body movements to a virtual character. In the second-step, we will examine whether perceiving this personalized video game character executing novel body movements would improve a player's creativity. The system is based on recent experimental evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience, showing that a common coding in the brain connects execution, perception and imagination of movements. Based on this common coding idea, we hypothesize that executing novel movements in a video game would improve imagination of novel movements. And this, in turn, would improve creativity in both sciences and arts involving movement.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu; Michael Nitsche, michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Meekal Bajaj, Paul Clifton, Tandav Krishna, Geoffrey Thomas
Collaborator(s): Sanjay Chandrasekharan, University of Calgary
Architales
Demo Description: Tables are artifacts around which people gather. They become organized spaces of exchange and consumption. Kitchens are organized around the dining table; meeting rooms are organized around the conference table; living spaces are organized around the coffee table. Tables perform two complementary and simultaneous tasks: bringing people together to promote intimacy and holding them just enough apart to provide security. As technology becomes a vehicle for tangible interactions, tables establish the framework for social interaction instances. The Story Table is a symbiosis of two social spaces: story and table collapsed onto one another.
Created through a process of co-construction of digital and physical media, the Story Table is an interactive installation that encompasses shared engagement in cinematically-inspired narrative expressions that unfold on its surface and space.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu, Tristan Al-Haddad, Claudia Winegarden
Student(s): Susan Robinson, Andy Wu & the XMedia Group
Gamewell
Demo Description: The gamewell project brings digital content and computational game engines to the table to enable new forms of multi-player tabletop game play. Traditional tabletop games are a popular pastime: they serve to entertain and to challenge, and they provide an informal setting for improvisational storytelling, role-playing and face-to-face social interaction among players. On digital tabletops, an embedded display and multi-user interaction via touch or tagged tangible objects integrates the physicality of traditional tabletop game-play with the increased complexity afforded by computationally-driven games. Gamewell is a platform and manager for tangible and multi-touch tabletop games that allows us to explore novel interaction methods and game genres for digital tabletops. The first games include ColorCross, a Twister-inspired cooperative game, and Space Vectors, a multi-player tabletop strategy game.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Tatum Clanton, Daniel Gibson, Andy Korzik, Elijah O'Rear, Ari Velazquez, Peter Watanabe, Steph Yang
TTT: Tangible Tracking Table
Demo Description: An interactive tabletop display that allows multiple fingertip tracking and tangible object tracking. The table can be used for a range of digital media applications in collaborative settings such as meeting rooms, classrooms and living rooms. The demo shows our current technology prototype. Applications under development include games and storytelling engines, as well as a stage manager for machinima creation.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Andy Wu
KinoPuzzle
Demo Description: KinoPuzzle draws on collage-making traditions to engage viewers in tabletop documentary stories using a combination of tangible pieces, digital images, video, and meta-data relationships.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Susan Robinson, Andy Wu, Daniel Razza
RENATI
Demo Description: Recontextualizing oral narratives using tangible interface technologies. The focus is on the design of a narrative for traditional film/video screen presentation and then its redesign for a tangible interactive experience. Two prototypes
presented: FLYING OVER PURGATORY, and CRAZYQUILT SIGHTINGS:
Surviving Broken Levees and Katrina.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Ayoka Chenzira, Geoffrey Thomas
Embodied Comics
Demo Description: Comics conventions are extended into 3D space with real-time interactions. The distorted self-projections of participants become characters of a dramatic experience, which at the end provides a traditional comic strip based on snapshots that were taken throughout.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Yanfeng Chen, Ozge Samanci
Moons Over You
Demo Description: Seeing multiple moons visible overhead is not our normal experience in the real world. Even though we can picture this kind of experience in our imaginations, we cannot properly share it with others. It can only visually exist in our own individual minds. We would like to share this experience by creating a poetic installation space of virtual and physical, where multiple moons can follow us around. In this gallery room, the audience can share their own imaginative and individual experience with others.
Faculty: Ali Mazalek, (404) 385-3179, mazalek@gatech.edu
Student(s): Hyun Jean Lee, Andy Wu, Yang-Ting Shen
Machinima Pre-visualization
Demo Description: Is Machinima technology is useful for pre-vis? And can it provide a fast and stable and accessible real-time platform for TV and film pre-production? We work on camera control and real-time pre-visualization, testing different real-time 3D engines (Unreal Tournament, Blender, Virtools).
Faculty: Michael Nitsche, michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu, Ali Mazalek, (mazalek@gatech.
Student: Evan Mandel
Playviz
Demo Descripton - Playvis is a pre-visualization and fundamental machinima production tool. Playvis tracks the camera position in Unreal Tournament, logs the data in an own text file, and provides a simple Flash-like editor to arrange different camera perspectives. Player can set up and arrange a wide range of cameras in the editor using Unreal as a real-time monitor. The scene itself stays real-time 3D. Info: http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/machinima/projects_Playvis/index.html
Faculty: Michael Nitsche, michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu,
Student: Courtland Goodson
COGNITIVE COMPUTING LAB
Location: Room 218
The Cognitive Computing Lab (CCL: www.ccl.cc.gatech.edu) pursues fundamental and applied research in the context of real-world problems that are "cognitive" in two respects: 1 (AI) they require cognition: we use artificial intelligence and learning technologies to produce intelligent behaviors; and 2 (HCC) they aid cognition: we use cognitive principles to design systems that interact naturally with humans. Our research thrusts include intelligent agents for interactive digital entertainment and computer games, and information analytics for decision support. Current projects include:
Second Mind
Demo Description: A significant bottleneck in developing believable characters in virtual worlds and other forms of digital entertainment is the effort required to create realistic personalities and behaviors for possible situations that might be encountered by the characters in the game. As a result, while users can customize the appearance of their avatars, extensive programming and artificial intelligence expertise is required to create believable human-like interactions. Second Mind is a cognitive modeling tool that uses a combination of AI and HCC methods to facilitate easy authoring of interactive personalities. We will explain the project concept by demonstrating example scenarios.
Faculty: Ashwin Ram
Students: Manish Mehta (PhD-HCC), Abhishek Jain (MS-CS), Anna Mansour (MS-HCI)
SONIFICATION LAB
Location: Room 222
Auditory Graph Design, Context Cues, and Individual Differences
Demo Description: Creating a (visual) graph without axes, tick marks, or labels will generally earn you an 'F' in high school math class. After all, it is just a squiggle on a page without the added context that those things provide. Auditory graphs require the same elements, so we are studying how best to create them, introduce them into an auditory graph, and examine how people learn to use them for better (auditory) graph comprehension. At the same time, every person hears things slightly differently. Our work in individual differences in auditory display comprehension examines such questions as:
i) How can we determine, in advance, what differences will have an effect (if any) in the perception and comprehension of auditory graphs and sonification?
ii) What are the characteristics of the listener that predict performance? We are studying a range of factors, including perception, cognition, and listening experience. One major factor we are considering is whether a listener is sighted or blind, and if blind, at what age blindness occurred. Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu
Student(s): Michael Nees, Lisa Mauney
The Sonification Sandbox: Auditory Graphing Software
Demo Description: We have developed a sophisticated, flexible software platform that can turn data into an auditory graph. This Java-based system includes a spreadsheet for manipulating the numbers, and produces visual graphs, auditory graphs, and a range of multimodal combinations. The graphs can be played within the program, saved in a special lightweight file format for sharing or editing later, or exported to image, sound, or movie files. We have evaluated the usability and accessibility of the Sonification Sandbox, and we are now working with public school students and teachers to study its utility for teaching math and science. We are also working on versions of the software that run on mobile devices and on the web (think, Google Charts).
Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu
Student(s): Ben Davison, Anya Kogan, Lisa Mauney
Advanced Auditory Menus: Non-visual User Interfaces for Mobile Devices
Demo Description: Spoken menus can be dramatically improved with the careful addition of different types of non-speech sounds. Such enhancement sounds have the potential to convey contextual information and feedback while a user navigates more quickly and effectively through the menu of an electronic device. We have developed desktop and mobile demos, in Flash, Java, and Symbian. We will highlight auditory scroll bars and spearcons (brief sound cues created by speeding up the original text-to-speech sound file in a novel way).
Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, (404) 894-8265, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu
Student(s): Anya Kogan, Unkyong Lee, Siddharth Gupta, Ben Davison, Myounghoon Jeon
The SWAN Project
Demo Description: The SWAN Project is an NSF funded collaboration between Professors Bruce Walker (Psychology and Computing) and Frank Dellaert (Computing) to develop a system to help people with low vision navigate from place to place, while being aware of features of the surrounding environment, such as stairs, signs, offices, shops, curbs, and so on. We use sensor fusion to combine computer vision with GPS, maps, and other sensors, then produce a set of auditory cues to guide and inform the user. We are extending this work to astronauts, factory workers, and tactical situations. Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/swan/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu; Frank Dellaert, dellaert@cc.gatech.edu
Student(s): Jeff Lindsay, Jeff Wilson, Sangmin Oh
The Accessible Aquarium Project
Demo Description: Museums, science centers, zoos and aquaria are faced with educating and entertaining an increasingly diverse visitor population with varying physical and sensory needs. In an effort to make such "informal learning environments" more accessible to visually impaired visitors, the Georgia Tech Accessible Aquarium Project is developing auditory display and sonification methods for use in exhibit interpretation. Our project uses advanced computer vision techniques to track the fish (and other creatures), then uses the movement data to create meaningful and aesthetic music. The music is then presented to a visitor via a mobile audio device, which allows them to interact with the music options, further enhancing their learning and enjoyment. This project is a collaboration between Psychology, Interactive Computing, CATEA, and Music. Web: http://www.accessibleaquarium.org
Faculty: Bruce Walker, bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu; Tucker Balch, tucker.balch@cc.gatech.edu; Gil Weinberg, gilw@gatech.edu.
Student(s): Jin Han Lee, Sriram Viswanathan, Ruchir Gupta
“Bonephones”: Bone Conduction Audio Research
Demo Description: We are investigating the use of bone-conduction headsets in auditory displays. This merits many different investigations into the perceptual qualities of listening through bone conduction. This includes thresholds, spatial audio abilities, reaction times, and speech intelligibility. Web: http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/research/bonephones/index.html
Faculty: Bruce Walker, (404) 894-8265,bruce.walker@psych.gatech.edu
Student(s): Raymond Stanley, Naomi Warnick
Audio Puzzler: Piecing Together Time-Stamped Video Transcripts with a Puzzle Game
Demo Description: Audio Puzzler is a casual online puzzle game which as a by-product of play produces a time-stamped transcription of the spoken audio taken from short online videos. Players transcribe and then piece together overlapping snippets of the audio in order to complete the puzzle. Games of this type belong to a larger class of applications known as "Human Computation" applications which seek to formulate banal tasks as lusory ones in order to collect data and make computers smarter in the process of people playing. Audio Puzzler is fun and it produces transcripts that are both more accurate than automatically produced transcripts and have per word timing information.
Faculty: Irfan Essa
Student: Nicholas Diakopoulos
Videolyzer: Quality Analysis of Online Informational Video for Bloggers and Journalists
Demo Description: Tools to aid people in making sense of the information quality of online informational video are essential for media consumers seeking to be well informed. Videolyzer addresses the information quality problem in video by allowing politically motivated bloggers or journalists to analyze, collect, and share criticisms of the information quality of online political videos. The interface innovates by providing a fine-grained and tightly coupled interaction paradigm between the timeline, the time-synced transcript, and annotations. We also incorporate automatic textual and video content analysis to suggest areas of interest for further assessment by a person. We are in the process of evaluating and studying the effectiveness of Videolyzer in enhancing users' ability to make sense of the information in videos.
Faculty: Irfan Essa
Student: Nicholas Diakopoulos
INTELLIGENT NARRATIVE COMPUTING
Location – Room 223
Automated Story Generation
Demo Description - Storytelling is engaging. However, how does a computational system sustain engagement when the designer/author is no longer in the loop? The goal of this research is to develop algorithms and agents that are capable of producing novel fictional story content from a relatively minimal set of input parameters. That is, algorithms that express creativity in story production. While we are approaching the problem in an application-neutral way, target applications include procedural content in computer games, educational engagement, movie generation, and creativity support. We treat narrative generation as a problem to be solved in which the solution is a story – an artifact enumerating a temporally ordered sequence of events enacted by characters. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/
Faculty: Mark Riedl
Interactive Stories
Demo Description - An interactive story system is a system that attempts to tell a story in which the user is an interactive participant – a character in the story world – and is capable of making decisions and performing actions that change the direction and/or outcome of the story. What distinguishes an interactive story from a conventional computer game or training simulation is the need to balance two competing goals: story coherence and user agency. Story coherence is the preservation of good storytelling practice in that events should progress in a meaningful way and achieves some intended impact on the audience. User agency is the preservation of the user’s ability to make decisions and perform actions at any time based on his or her goals, beliefs, and desires. We have produced a prototype interactive story framework that can be instantiated for entertainment, education, and training contexts.
Faculty: Mark Riedl
Intelligent Virtual Cinematography
Demo Description - Virtual cinematography refers to the cinematic projection of scenes occurring in a 2D or 3D graphical environment onto a flat screen, with a virtual camera serving the role of a physical one. An intelligent virtual cinematography system uses artificial intelligence processes to automatically position a camera in the graphical environment in order to capture a scene in a meaningful way. We are developing systems that can automatically produce machinima – movies produced in graphical environments such as those provided by computer games – given a script, a virtual world, and a set of key cinematic knowledge.
Faculty: Mark Riedl
DESIGN INTELLIGENCE LAB
Location 225
ACT: Learning Models of Complex Systems in Middle School Science
Complex systems are an important part of our world. Development of accurate mental models of complex systems is an integral part of learning in science. While experts in science demonstrate a rich understanding of a complex system in terms of its interrelated structure, behaviors and functions, novices express their understanding of a complex system primarily in terms of its structure and demonstrate minimal understanding of its behaviors and functions. The goal of our project is to facilitate the learning of the interconnectedness of the structure, behaviors and functions of complex systems. ACT (Aquarium Construction Toolkit) is an interactive learning environment targeting middle-school students. ACT facilitates learning about complex systems (such as an aquarium) by allowing the students to build conceptual models of complex systems in
Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) ontology. SBF ontology emphasizes all three aspects of a complex system and, more importantly, their interrelationships. Furthermore, ACT allows learners to simulate their conceptual models in the NetLogo simulation environment as a means of evaluating their models. ACT also contains an electronic notebook to record data and other information generated during learners' inquiry.
Faculty: Ashok Goel
Students: Vivek Menon, Swaroop Vattam, Spencer Rugaber
DANTE: A Tool for Biologically Inspired Engineering Design
Biologically inspired design is the practice of developing innovative technology inspired by ideas from nature. Energy efficient buildings inspired by passive cooling in termite mounds and non-toxic fabric finishes inspired by water repellent lotus plants are examples of biologically inspired design changing our world today. The key idea behind biologically inspired design is that millions of species – each with many billions of years of field testing (evolution) - contain unique and successful technological ideas that can help us succeed in our innovations. But practitioners of biologically inspired design have a common complaint - they lack access to relevant biological information organized in a manner helpful for innovation. Innovators working on desalination, for instance, can't learn about how nature removes salt from water - mangroove roots, kidneys, bird salt glands - all in one place. The DANTE project aims to address this issue by providing technological infrastructure that can be used to build large-scale, decentralized, biological knowledge-base. This knowledge-base is designed to provide (a) inspiration: innovators can browse and search a catalog of biological solutions, (b) knowledge-sharing: biologists can publish their biological know-how in a language that is more accessible to the innovators, (c) collaboration: innovators and biologists can come together and share knowledge, (d) a common language: typically, innovators (engineers) and biologists speak different languages, making collaboration harder. Our knowledge-base provides a simple (cognitively-inspired) ontology that can form the basis for a common language for communication of knowledge among these two communities.
Faculty: Ashok Goel
Students: Swaroop Vattam, Michael Helms
STAB: A Tool for Sensemaking in Investigative Analysis
Humans often use stories as a means of understanding large groups of interconnected facts. STAB applies the same principles to iteratively construct story plots based on vast amounts of intelligence data, thereby helping in the analysis and prediction of criminal intent.
Faculty: Ashok Goel
Students: Avik Sinharoy
Thinking in Pictures: A New Cognitive Model of Autism
We are developing a new model of cognition in autism that centers on the use of visual representations and processing. Our work is inspired by
several introspective accounts of autism, most notably the book "Thinking in Pictures" and other writings by Temple Grandin, a well-known author and scientist with autism. Our hope is that this cognitive account will lead to new and better ways of understanding, communicating with, and educating individuals on the autism spectrum. From the perspective of this model, autism may also provide a unique window into the nature of visual cognition and how the brain can adapt to perform cognitive tasks within the confines of disparate representational systems.
Faculty: Ashok Goel
Students: Maithilee Kunda
HUMAN FACTORS AND AGING LAB
Location: Room 226
Long Term Interaction between Humans and Relational Agents
Demo Description: Looking into long term interactions between humans and relational agents. The project aims to understand the effect of variables like performance measures, attitudinal measures, reliability measures for a variety of different nature of tasks. Our aim is to understand how these variables might be affected by or how they might affect the different tasks - a serious life threatening task or an entertaining task, and characteristics of the relational agent. The effect of the tasks and the characteristics would also be studies over different age groups (older and younger adults). The demo looks into the nature of the study, the prototypes and other details of the study.
Faculty: Dr. Arthur D. Fisk & Wendy A. Rogers, Human Factors and Aging Lab
Students: Sung Park, Aditi Singh
Privacy Concerns and Disclosure Behavior in a Health Setting
Demo Description: Health care practitioners need complete and accurate information to provide quality care to their patients. However, health information is considered to be highly private. Patients may have concerns about disclosing such information, especially if asked to provide this information using technology. In this project we investigate how participants' experience with a technology affects their level of disclosure in a health setting. Specifically, we were interested in understanding how the use of a health database system influences the disclosure of private health information.
Faculty: Dr. Arthur D. Fisk & Wendy A. Rogers, Human Factors and Aging Lab Student: Kelly Caine
SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT MACHINES LAB
Location: TSRB 228
Simon Robot Demonstration
Demo Description: Our lab is in the process of building a new social robot platform, Simon, for our research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In this demonstration you can see our progress in building Simon's socially expressive head, including a demonstration of social attention mechanisms for natural HRI.
Faculty: Andrea Thomaz
Students: Maya Cakmak, Michael Gielniak, Crystal Chao, Brian Sherwell
Learning About Objects from Human Teachers
Demo Description: We use a small upper-torso humanoid robot, Junior, to study social and non-social learning about objects, to understand how people scaffold a robot's learning. Preliminary observations point to important differences. For example, a teacher helps the robot quickly collect positive examples, and self-learning allows the robot to explore the negative space of the problem.
Faculty: Andrea Thomaz
Students: Maya Cakmak
Robot Playmates
Demo Description: Developmental robotics is a field that strives to build computational models (in robots) of human developmental processes. The goal is to better understand human development, and to build intelligent robots. In this project we are exploring a particular aspect of development, social learning. With three robots of similar morphology, Junior, Jimmy, and Jenny, we are studying the computational advantage of a social learning peer. Looking at the ways in which these robots can learn more about their environment when they are with peers than if they were alone.
Faculty: Andrea Thomaz
Students: Nick DePalma, Kanan Garg, Maya Cakmak
CONTEXTUAL COMPUTING GROUP
Location – Room 243
Pianotouch
Demo Description: PianoTouch is a part of Mobile Music Touch, which is a system designed to passively teach people how to play musical instruments, while they're doing other tasks such as working at their desk or reading on a long commute. The system consists of two parts: 1) a lightweight, wireless, tactile glove with a vibration motor for each finger, and 2) a mobile device such as MP3 player or cell phone. As the music is played on the MP3 player, the synced tactile glove vibrates the corresponding fingers in charge of playing the notes. Thus, a user can hear the music and feel it playing on their hands. A user can use this system to automatically rehearse piano, trumpet, sax, etc songs while going about their daily routines.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Kevin Huang
Deaf911
Demo Description: The Deaf 911 system emulates an TTY (teletypewriter) on a cell phone providing deaf users with direct and easy access to emergency services. Deaf users can dial 911 from a cell phone and communicate with the 911 operator through an Instant Messaging style interface. The software TTY then encodes the text as TTY signals and sends it over the voice channel. Incoming TTY signals are decoded and displayed as text.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Zahoor Zafrulla
CopyCat
Demo Description: This project involves the design and evaluation of an interactive computer game that allows deaf children to practice their American Sign Language skills. The game includes an automatic sign language recognition component utilizing computer vision and wireless accelerometers. The project is a collaboration with Dr. Harley Hamilton at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Students: Zahoor Zafrulla; Kim Weaver
iSign
Demo Description: This project involves the development and evaluation of a mobile content delivery system. Using small, unplanned moments throughout the day, we will endeavor to increase participants knowledge of American Sign Language vocabulary. This project also involves efforts assess the efficacy of content delivery to mobile phones and traditional, desktop-based systems.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Kim Weaver
Telesign
Demo Description: This project involves the design and evaluation of a mobile ASL phrase book to help Deaf individuals communicate with hearing individuals when performing tasks such as hunting for an apartment or taking a pet to the vet.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Kim Weaver
Mobiphos
Demo Description: Collocated use of mobile phones is becoming more common. We have designed, built, and evaluated, a photo sharing application that enables synchronous sharing of photos taken by individuals in collocated groups (tourists, mobile classrooms, military coordination). This project has uncovered tensions in the way that today’s mobile technology is designed, built, and evaluated and illuminated the benefits of designing for group use of mobile devices.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: JungSoo Kim
Bear
Demo Description: Fuzzy the bear is a tool to help deaf children learn sign language. Incorporating RFID and video, a hidden sensor in his forehead reads an RFID flashcard and shows the ASL video for that English word in a screen in his stomach. The bear was evaluated at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf and is in the process of a second, longitudinal evaluation through Georgia PINES.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Jesse Smith
Child's Play
Demo Description: The Chi ld's Play project focuses on the design of technological tools to help increase the understanding of children's development through the exploration of toddler-object interaction. Specifically, this project embeds wireless sensors into children's toys to allow automatic recognition of different types of play behaviors allowing for potential characterizations of the child's developmental progress and retrospective analysis
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Tracy Westyn
Rapid Prototyping
Demo Description: With the variety of hardware needs that our lab has, we often find ourselves making what we can't buy. To aid in this, we have several tools that we commonly use to prototype everything from plastic parts to circuit boards. For plastic parts, we have a 3D printer than can print ABS plastic from a 3D model, as well as a laser cutter/etcher for cutting plexiglass, wood, paper, and fabric. Next, we have a full complement of surface-mount soldering tools - essential for assembling some of our smaller circuit boards. These have enabled us to develop our own series of wireless acceleration sensors tailored to our needs, measuring just one inch square. These sensors have been used in several projects, including Child's Play. Finally, we have a sewing setup for working with conductive textiles. This enables us to develop the flexible, wearable electronics, such as the wristband used in the EMMA project.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Scott Gilliland
EMMA: Electro-touch for Mobile Multitasking Alert
Demo Description: EMMA is a wearable textile-based electro-tactile display that provides an alert with spatio-temporal tactile patterns through a wristband. Unlike stationary desktop environment, people are often engaged in several tasks while they are on-the-go. In most mobile multitasking situation, the demand on the visual attention is relatively high. Due to the limited resources for human attention, the users have to shift their visual attention from the device to the environment frequently. EMMA is designed to reduce the need of visual attention to the users of mobile and wearable computing. The textile-based grid of electrodes of EMMA provides a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-wear, and vision-free alert system for the on-the-go users.
Faculty: Thad Starner
Student: Seungyon Claire Lee
DIRECT BRAIN INTERFACES – GT BRAINLAB
Location – Room 243
The mission of the GT BrainLab is to pioneer dramatically new paradigms for human-computer interaction by exploring the potential of biometric and direct brain inputs for communication and control. BrainLab technologies aim to improve the quality of life for people with severe motor disabilities, and to explore possibilities for mainstream applications for biometric technologies. Demos and posters will include:
The Aware Chair
Demo Description: In order to incorporate an intelligent, context-aware communication, environmental control, and navigation system that learns its users’ preferences and habits in order to predict selections. The goal of the Aware Chair research is to make brain signal control faster, easier, and more accurate for people with severe physical disabilities. A new heads-up display based on visual brain signals is the basis of our latest study.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
Neural Internet
Demo Description: Access to the internet can be life-changing for people with severe disabilities. The BrainBrowser allows neural control of web surfing, including following hyperlinks and web controls.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
Brain Gesture Recognition
Demo Description - This new study is exploring composite patterns of brain signals in order to determine if gesture languages such as American Sign Language can be recognized with EEG.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
BrainArt: Creative Expression
Demo Description: Visual art, such as drawing and painting, requires continuous control accuracy that is difficult to achieve with direct brain interfaces. This new study incorporates functional Near Infrared (fNIR) imaging, a direct brain approach based on measuring the hemodynamic response of the brain to activity.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
Neural Plasticity
Demo Description: Neural Plasticity - A new collaboration with GT Applied Physiology and BioEngineering is exploring the possibilities of incorporating direct brain interfaces with rehabilitation robots to provide treatment options for people with severe paralysis resulting from strokes.
Faculty: Melody Moore, melody@cc.gatech.edu
4D Cities
Location: BORG Lab, Room 234/235
Demo Description: Interactive demo of 4D cities project..
Faculty: Frank Dellaert
Student: Grant Schindler
