IRES: US-German Research on Human-Computer Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing

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Technical description. The UNH IRES program is a cooperative effort between the University of New Hampshire and the University of Stuttgart in Germany. The focus of the program is on ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp. Ubicomp is a multidisciplinary field of study that explores networked computing devices that are embedded in everyday objects. Each summer 3 undergraduate and 3 graduate students will conduct research for just over 8 weeks at the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab of Professor Albrecht Schmidt at the University of Stuttgart. The HCI Lab is one of the leading ubicomp laboratories in the world. Student research within the UNH Ubicomp IRES program will focus on two areas: in-vehicle speech interaction and speech interaction with public displays. Students will initially investigate in-vehicle speech interactions to establish how different speech recognition error rates and different response times affect the driver. Students will subsequently contrast interacting with a computer to interacting with a passenger. Finally, students will use the results of these experiments to propose new, safer approaches to driver-computer spoken interactions. In the context of speech interactions with public displays, students will explore the use of pupil diameter measurements from video camera based eye trackers to estimate the cognitive load associated with spoken interactions with electronic bulletin boards. Students will develop techniques for separating pupil diameter changes that are due to cognitive load from those that are due to visual target luminance on the display. Students will subsequently use pupil diameter to evaluate the cognitive load associated with different types of interactions with public displays, providing a baseline for proposing novel interactions that mix spoken and manual interactions. Non-technical description.The UNH IRES program is a cooperative effort between the University of New Hampshire and the University of Stuttgart in Germany. The focus of the program is on ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp. Ubicomp is a multidisciplinary field of study that explores networked computing devices that are embedded in everyday objects. Each summer 3 undergraduate and 3 graduate students will conduct research for just over 8 weeks at the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab of Professor Albrecht Schmidt at the University of Stuttgart. The HCI Lab is one of the leading ubicomp laboratories in the world. Student research within the UNH IRES program will focus on two areas: in-vehicle speech interaction and speech interaction with public displays. In the automotive domain, speech interaction with in-vehicle devices is an important topic. In-vehicle devices, such as built-in entertainment systems, and brought-in mobile phones, are proliferating, and research has shown that it can be dangerous to interact with these devices by touching and/or looking. Thus, much research has been done to explore speech as an alternative way of interaction with in-vehicle devices. Students in the UNH IRES program will relate the benefits and limitations of speech interaction with in-vehicle devices with real-world parameters, such as how well speech recognition works at any given moment. They will also work to identify why it is that talking to a passenger appears to reduce the probability of a crash, and how we might be able to use this new information to create safer in-vehicle speech interactions.Speech interaction is also an exciting topic in the budding exploration of electronic bulletin boards. Today, people use bulletin boards to display and read printed (physical) notices. But tomorrow?s electronic bulletin boards will act more like large, public webpages, edited by users from their mobile phones. Students in the UNH IRES program will compare speech interaction with other types of interactions with such electronic bulletin boards (such as typing directly on the bulletin board, or typing on a mobile phone). They will pay special attention to assessing the mental effort of each type of interaction. Their long-term goal will be to assess if speech interaction can reduce this mental effort.