Andrew Kun

On Wednesday and Thursday, Oskar Palinko, Mark Taipan and I participated in the NIJ CommTech Technical Working Group meeting. On Wednesday I gave the presentation below reporting on our lab’s progress.

On Thursday we participated in the meeting’s demo session. We demonstrated the advantage of using voice commands to control a police radio over using the radio’s buttons. We used a single-computer driving simulator and a radio setup. Of course the first driving simulator experiment we published investigated this effect [1]. We also demonstrated accessing a remote database using the Project54 system running on a Symbol handheld computer. We expect that, once we get approval from the NH State Police to deploy such devices (NHSP is responsible for data access for all officers in the state), they will be a big hit with local departments.

One of the many people we had a chance to talk to at the TWG meeting is Gil Emery, Communications Manager at the Portsmouth, NH PD. Gil was interested in the handhelds and we may be able to work with him on using these handhelds as cameras that allow tagging pictures on the spot and then using a cellular network to transmit them to headquarters. This work would build on Michael Farrar’s MS thesis research.

You can see pictures from this event of Flickr.

References

[1] Zeljko Medenica, Andrew L. Kun, “Comparing the Influence of Two User Interfaces for Mobile Radios on Driving Performance,” Driving Assessment 2007

After my trip to Automotive UI 2009 I flew to Budapest, Hungary. The UNH College of Engineering and Physical Sciences has an exchange program with BUTEand I went to promote this program to BUTE students. I also got a chance to meet two people responsible for implementing the program “on the ground” in Budapest, Eszter Kiss and Máté Helfrich. Eszter is the person who looks after the UNH students (and many others from all over the world) from the time they arrive in Budapest, so I was very happy to meet her and express UNH’s gratitude for all of her efforts.

Eszter organized a talk in which I presented some of the reasons why a semester at UNH would be beneficial to BUTE students (see the slides). The discussion that followed my presentation was excellent, with students asking questions about many aspects of the exchange program, as well as a new summer internship program. The discussion was in Hungarian, which was fun, as I don’t use this language for work very much :)

You can see more pictures about my visit on Flickr.

Last Monday and Tuesday I was in Essen, Germany, at the Automotive User Interfaces 2009 conference. This was the first Automotive UI conference and it was quite successful with around 60 participants, according to conference chair Albrecht Schmidt. Here’s Albrecht welcoming us to AutoUI ‘09 and the University of Duisburg-Essen:

I gave a talk at the conference about our latest navigation study that investigated the influence of two personal navigation devices on driving performance and visual attention. This was collaborative work with Tim Paek of Microsoft Research. For more information on our findings check out the paper or take a look at the slides:

Three weeks ago I visited Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, MA. My hosts were Bret Hersham and his colleagues Garrett Weinberg and Bent Schmidt-Nielsen. The proximate reason for my visit was that one of my PhD students, Zeljko Medenica, worked under Bret as a summer intern.

As part of my visit I saw the MERL driving simulator, which is an excellent adaptation of a computer game for research purposes (read more about it in Garrett and Bret’s Automotive UI 2009 paper). I really like the driving courses that they can use (e.g. winding mountain roads and narrow village streets) and I’m impressed with the performance of the simulator’s chair which shakes and tilts.

After the simulator tour I gave a talk on our latest navigation study, which compared driving performance and visual attention when using two personal navigation aids: one that displays a map and provides spoken instructions and another that provides spoken instructions only. The talk was based on our Automotive UI 2009 paper.

Finally, I had a chance to talk to Fatih Porikli, who showed me some great videos of his work on recognizing pedestrians. We also discussed possible collaboration on learning grammars for using voice commands to tag photos. More about this in another post.