Today I visited Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, MA. My host was Mary Stearns, Chief of Surface Transportation Human Factors at Volpe.
During my visit I had a chance to experience two very interesting simulators. The first one was a train engine simulator, the second a Boeing 737 simulator – see pictures below.
As part of the visit I also gave a presentation about our work at UNH on Project54 and on exploring in-vehicle HMI.
See more pictures on Flickr.
Last week my PhD student Zeljko Medenica advanced to candidacy. Zeljko plans to create a driving performance measure that would be sensitive to short-lived and/or infrequent degradations in driving performance. In previous driving simulator-based studies [1, 2] we found that glancing away from the road is correlated with worse driving performance. Importantly, this is true even when performance averages over the length of the entire experiment are not affected. Thus, Zeljko plans to explore the use of cross-correlation in creating a new, highly sensitive driving performance measure.
Zeljko’s PhD committee includes Paul Green (UMTRI), Tim Paek (Microsoft Research), Nicholas Kirsch (UNH) and Tom Miller (UNH). Thanks to all for serving!
References
[1] Andrew L. Kun, Tim Paek, Zeljko Medenica, Nemanja Memarovic, Oskar Palinko, “Glancing at Personal Navigation Devices Can Affect Driving: Experimental Results and Design Implications,” Automotive UI 2009
[2] Zeljko Medenica, Andrew L. Kun, Tim Paek, Oskar Palinko, “Augmented Reality vs. Street Views: A Driving Simulator Study Comparing Two Emerging Navigation Aids,” to appear at MobileHCI 2011
Yesterday I participated in the work of the 2011 Emergency Responders Workshop (pdf) organized by WisDOT, CVTA and GLTEI. The workshop had two major goals. One was to provide a sampling of state-of-the-art technologies used by emergency responders. The other was to begin charting a path toward developing advanced technologies. Participants from emergency responder agencies, industry and academia discussed their vision for future technologies as well as barriers to progress.
My presentation focused on pervasive (or ubiquitous) computing for law enforcement. I encouraged participants to ask the following question:
“What should be the focus of R&D efforts targeting percom technologies for emergency responders?”
CVTA President Scott McCormick (in picture below) and WisDOT’s John Corbin led the meeting superbly – thanks to both for including me in this effort.
For more pictures from the event visit Flickr.
In an effort to promote the CEPS–BUTE exchange program I gave the following presentation to two similar audiences here at UNH. Last Monday Kent Chamberlin hosted me in his ECE 401 class (the introductory ECE course) and I had a chance to talk to about 75 ECE freshmen. Today I gave the presentation to Bob Henry’s TECH 400 students (TECH 400 introduces the CEPS majors to CEPS undeclared students).
My main point was this: spending a semester abroad gives students a competitive advantage because it proves that they can adapt to change. Of course spending a semester in Europe allows students to travel and I spent some time promoting my favorite travel guide author, Rick Steves 🙂