We are glad to present Dr. Sandra Cairncross as an invited speaker of the SRL lab.

Title: Researching Engineering Education: Some Philosophical Considerations

Abstract: Enhancements to teaching, learning and assessment in engineering require the underpinning of research and scholarship into the academic practice of engineering education as well as that of disciplined based research, if they are to lead to lasting benefits for students. Research into engineering education can take different forms ranging from large scale multi-institutional studies to cross-institutional impact analysis to individual teachers undertaking action research and can often be challenging, requiring an understanding of not only how students learn but also an understanding of educational research methods. There are a variety of different and often contradictory approaches to educational research which can make it difficult for the novice researcher to decide which one to select for a given study. Indeed many academics, when first embarking on research into education, naturally draw upon the research methods associated with their own discipline. However the most appropriate method for researching a given subject is not necessarily the most appropriate for researching the education of that subject. A case study is presented on the experiences of one researcher into engineering education research, as they diversified from methods rooted in their own discipline into methods borrowed from other disciplines. Consideration of underlying philosophical concepts frames this journey in a wider context, allowing key concerns to be explored. These concerns include the value of controlled experiments in the context of engineering education and the use of interpretativist approaches to illuminate particular situations. The importance of understanding different methodologies, and the claims that they can support, will be discussed, both in the context of conducting one's own research but also in the context of interpreting the work of others, thereby enabling researchers to take a more critical approach. This is of particular importance when seeking to apply findings of others to one's own practice as well as placing one's own research in an appropriate theoretical context. Ethical issues are also considered. Educational research should be prompted by a desire to improve the common good and should seek to minimise harm to learners. Ethical considerations should inform both the conduct of the research and the dissemination of findings. This can prove problematic when undertaking practitioner-based research. Key aspects will be explored. These reflections will be useful to others embarking on their own research projects. Drawing upon key western philosophical traditions, social science theories and pedagogy, the paper argues that an understanding of key aspects of philosophy, in particular consideration of "what is knowledge?" and "how we come to know" can improve the design of investigations into how students learn, and how that learning can be enhanced.

Bio: Dr Sandra Cairncross was appointed as Dean of Engineering, Computing & Creative Industries in April 2008. Prior to that she was Associate Dean with responsibility for Academic Quality and Customer Service. Her role is to lead the strategic development of the Faculty, building on its excellent track record in supporting Scotland's knowledge based economy through providing a portfolio of academic programmes and engaging in research and knowledge transfer which are relevant to the needs of students, business and industry and other stakeholders. Dr Cairncross is Chartered Engineer and a member of the Institute of Educational Technology and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy with a background in Interactive Media Design. She is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh Napier and the focus of her doctoral students was how best to use new learning technologies to enhance teaching and learning and the student experience and has published in this area.

Location: Room 124 - H.R. Bright Building, Monday, October 12

Louis-Philippe Morency from USC, will present at a parasol seminar.

Title: Computational Study Of Nonverbal Social Communication

Abstract: The goal of this emerging research field is to recognize, model and predict human nonverbal behavior in the context of interaction with virtual humans, robots and other human participants. At the core of this research field is the need for new computational models of human interaction emphasizing the multi-modal, multi-participant and multi-behavior aspects of human behavior. This multi-disciplinary research topic overlaps the fields of multi-modal interaction, social psychology, computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and has many applications in areas as diverse as medicine, robotics and education. During my talk, I will focus on three novel approaches to achieve efficient and robust nonverbal behavior modeling and recognition: (1) a new visual tracking framework (GAVAM) with automatic initialization and bounded drift which acquires online the view-based appearance of the object, (2) the use of latent-state models in discriminative sequence classification (Latent-Dynamic CRF) to capture the influence of unobservable factors on nonverbal behavior and (3) the integration of contextual information (specifically dialogue context) to improve nonverbal prediction and recognition.

Bio: Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency is currently research professor at USC Institute for Creative Technologies where he leads the Nonverbal Behaviors Understanding project (ICT-NVREC). He received his Ph.D. from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2006. His main research interest is computational study of nonverbal social communication, a multi-disciplinary research topic that overlays the fields of multi-modal interaction, computer vision, machine learning, social psychology and artificial intelligence. He developed "Watson", a real-time library for nonverbal behavior recognition and which became the de-facto standard for adding perception to embodied agent interfaces. He received many awards for his work on nonverbal behavior computation including three best-paper awards in 2008 (at various IEEE and ACM conferences). He was recently selected by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of the "Ten to Watch" for the future of AI research.

Location: Room 302 - H.R. Bright Building, Monday, April 27

Dr. Henry Lieberman of the MIT Media Laboratory will present his talk titled "Drawing on Sketchy Knowledge" at 4:10 p.m. on Wednesday, April 22 in Room 124, H.R. Bright Building. We look forward to having him here to hear about his research!

Title: Drawing on Sketchy Knowledge

Location: Room 124 - H.R. Bright Building, Wednesday, April 22

IAP was developed in 2004 to improve the Texas A&M computer science department's relationships with industry. By improving our knowledge of industry needs and practices, we can better help prepare and place our students, and foster research collaborations.

IAP is sponsoring a Poster Display and Competition to be held March 3, 2009 at the Miramont Country Club. SRL member, Brandon Paulson is submitting a poster in the competition titled Towards a Framework for Truly Natural Low-Level Sketch Recognition.

The reception and poster presentation begins at 6:00 pm followed by dinner at 7:00 pm. The 1st place winner will receive a cash award of $500. The 2nd and 3rd place winners will receive $100 each.

Title: The Museum as an Arena for Multidisciplinary research: The PIL Museum Visitors’ Guide Project

Abstract: In recent years there has been considerable research focusing on intelligent museum visitor’s guides. The research mainly focused on supporting the individual visitor by providing personalized information in a context aware manner. This research mainly exploited the use of novel technological developments for better supporting individual museum visitors. This included: multimedia as a presentation tool, novel positioning technologies (such as infra red, RFID, WiFi, and more), presentation technologies/devices and more. However, people tend to visit museums in groups – organized tours, small groups of friends, families etc. It seems that the time is right to move now towards supporting groups of visitors in the museum. In the framework of the “PIL” project (PEACH-Israel, Italian-Israeli collaboration), a museum visitors’ guide system is developed. As part of the research, a methodology for multimedia presentations preparation has been developed, the idea of ubiquitous user modeling was defined and one of its techniques was applied for bootstrapping an on-site user model for the visitor, and a system was designed to enhance interaction among museum visitors (and thus enhance learning) by providing inter-group context aware communication mechanisms. In addition to supporting individuals, the system supports the whole group by providing time-trigger based recommendations for exhibits and presentations as the visit time is exhausted. The talk will present the research involved with the mobile museum visitor’s guide developed within the PIL project and focus on the demonstration of the context aware interaction mechanism and on the demonstration of the group support as examples for context aware services in active museum.

Bio: Tsvi Kuflik has been at the University of Haifa, Israel since 2004 and prior to this he has been with ITC-irst, since 2003, working on user modeling in "Active Museum". At the University of Haifa, Tsvi works on various research aspects related to "Active Museum", such as User Modeling, Intelligent User Interfaces, Context Awareness, Content Preparation and Multi Agents Software Engineering (in this work Tsvi combines together recent research interests with 20 years of experience in software and system engineering). This work is done in the framework of the collaboration between the University of Haifa (Israel) and ITC-irst (Trento, Italy), where research results and know-how are transferred from ITC-irst to Haifa and extended with local research. Tsvi’s research interests include user modeling, information filtering and retrieval, machine learning applications, decision support systems and software engineering.

Location: Room 302 - H.R. Bright Building, Friday, February 13

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research will present Dr. Randall Davis, “Steps Toward Natural Interaction,” November 11, 2008, 204E Evans Library. Dr. Davis is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with research interests in artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, intelligent interfaces and natural interaction.

Dr. Hammond and Sketch Recognition Lab graduate students with Dr. Randall Davis.

Frontiers In Education (FIE) 2008, October 22-25, 2008 in Saratoga Springs, New York. Josh Peschel, Katie Dahmen and Paul Taele will present a workshop, "Integrating Sketch Recognition Technologies into Your Classroom," on Wednesday, October 22.

(Left) Taele, Dahmen and Peschel; (Right) Peschel, Dr. Elizabeth Bristow of West Point and Dahmen.

Title: Is Sketch Recognition (Still) An Issue of Artificial Intelligence?

Abstract: Extracting information from a human and getting it into the computer as data has typically lagged behind the remarkable progress that has been made in manipulating and displaying that same data. This gap may be due to the fundamentally different way that humans and computers process input, an issue that was first identified in the 1970s. There have been two basic approaches to solving the problem: requiring the user to style the input in a way that is adapted to the computer or extracting features from the user's free-form input. Herot's early work in sketch recognition explored the latter approach, leading to the hypothesis that further progress would require advances in artificial intelligence (AI). This talk looks back at the problems that were identified then and explores whether AI is the answer today.

Bio: Christopher Herot is an entrepreneur in the field of digital media and communication. He is currently Chief Product Officer for VSee Labs, Inc. and a consultant to the entertainment and communications industries. He has founded three software companies and directed the Advanced Technology Group at Lotus Development Corporation. His interests include collaborative systems, digital audio and video, and wireless communications, all of which grew out of his work in sketch recognition at the MIT Architecture Machine, the group that became the MIT Media Laboratory. Herot received a MS in Electrical Engineering and an BS in Art & Design from MIT.

Location: Room 124 - H.R. Bright Building, Tuesday, October 21

Title: Fluid Interaction in Pen/Tablet Interfaces

Abstract: While pen/tablet computers promise a user experience that moves fluidly between input, editing, and program control, this promise is rarely realized due to usability shortcomings of current pen/tablet interfaces. In this talk, I will discuss our research on improving interaction on pen computers, including research on sketching on small screens, the paper digital divide, sloppy selection, and minimizing modes. The overall theme of this research thrust has been to analyze measurable parameters of users' actions in interfaces as an indicator of users' intentions. By understanding what users are trying to accomplish, we hope to design interfaces that speed interaction, reduce user errors, and provide a computing experience tailored to the user's current goals.

Bio: Dr. Edward Lank is an Assistant Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His research is in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), including applications of tablet computing, the study of motion kinematics in interfaces, and the design of pervasive computing applications. Prior to joining the faculty at Waterloo, Dr. Lank was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at San Francisco State University (2002 - 2006), was a research intern at the Palo Alto Research Center in the Perceptual Document Analysis Area (2001); was Chief Technical Officer of MediaShell Corporation, a Queen's University research start-up (2000 - 2001); and was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computing and Information Science at Queen's University (1997 - 2001). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada in 2001 under the supervision of Dr. Dorothea Blostein. He also holds a Bachelor's Degree in Physics with a Minor in Computer Science from the University of Prince Edward Island.

Location: Room 124 - H.R. Bright Building, Wednesday, October 15

Title: Steps Toward Natural Interaction

Abstract: Drawings, sketches, and diagrams of many sorts are ubiquitous in engineering education and practice, providing a powerful way to envision, explain, and reason. Yet historically diagrams have been static, passive pictures, comprehensible only to human observers. We aim to change that: we want to create a kind of "magic paper " that understands what is being drawn. We want to make it possible for a variety of surfaces to behave as that "paper," ranging from active whiteboards, to tablet computers, to desktops in classrooms and benches in laboratories. This is a vision of computing that spans the range from tablet computer notebooks full of magic paper to a new view of desktop computing: your (physical) desktop should compute. More generally yet, we want people to be able to sketch, gesture, and talk about their ideas in the way they do when interacting with each other, and have the "paper" understand the messy freehand sketches, casual gestures, and fragmentary utterances that are part and parcel of such interaction. Once this happens, a variety of powerful next steps are possible: a sketch of a design for a mechanical device, for example, might be simulated to display its behavior, analyzed (e.g., for structural soundness), or critiqued (e.g., for manufacturability). We want to produce systems for a variety of domains, including mechanical engineering, software architecture (e.g., UML diagrams), and digital electronic schematics, as well as sets of tools that will make it simple for others to create sketch understanding systems in additional domains. To date we have produced a demonstration system and a substantial foundation for the architecture of the next generation of this system. The proposed work will carry us through to the completion of that next generation architecture.

Bio: Dr. Davis is an expert in sketch recognition and runs the Design Rationale Group at MIT. Dr. Davis was Dr. Hammond's research advisor, as well as the advisor of many world-renowned sketch recognition faculty across the world including previous visitors Dr. Christine Alvarado of Harvey Mudd and Dr. Metin Sezgin of Cambridge University/Koc University.

Location: Room 204E - Evans Library, Saturday, October 11

Title: Hypothesis Testing and Model Selection for Clustering

Abstract: Clustering algorithms are widely used in data analysis, but they are difficult to apply when the number of appropriate clusters is unknown. This model selection problem is difficult to answer in unsupervised learning, since no training signal is available. In this talk I will introduce several methods of model selection for popular clustering algorithms such as K-means and Gaussian mixtures. The methods I'll present are primarily based on statistical hypothesis testing -- at local and global levels. The tests incorporate data projections (both deterministic and random) to simplify and speed the procedure.

Bio: Greg Hamerly is an assistant professor of computer science at Baylor University. His work is in machine learning, especially in model selection in unsupervised learning and applications to computer architecture simulation. Prior to Baylor he was at KU Leuven (Belgium) for a year as a postdoc, after graduating from UCSD in 2003.

Location: Room 302 - H.R. Bright Building, Monday, May 12

Title: Properties of Hand-Drawn Digital Logic Diagrams

Abstract: Programs that can recognize students' hand-drawn diagrams have the potential to revolutionize education by breaking down the barriers between diagram creation and simulation. Much recent work (including much of our own work) focuses on building robust recognition engines, but researchers have paid surprisingly little attention to the potential users of these systems. In this talk I will discuss a study in which we examined freely-drawn digital logic diagrams created by students in an electrical engineering class. Our goal was to understand how to construct a recognition engine that is robust to the way students actually draw in practice. Our analysis reveals considerable drawing style variation between students and that standard drawing style restrictions made by sketch recognition systems to aid recognition generally do not match the way students draw. I will discuss the implications the results from this study have on the design of sketch recognition systems.

Bio: Christine Alvarado is an assistant professor of computer science at Harvey Mudd College. Her primary research interests lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. She focuses on building robust,free-sketch recognition-based interfaces and exploring how to resolve the user interface challenges associated with these interfaces. In addition to her sketch understanding research, Prof.Alvarado is actively involved in outreach efforts to increase the number of women in computer science,and in designing novel introductory computer science curriculum that appeals to a broad scientific audience. Prof. Alvarado received her undergraduate degree in computer science from Dartmouth in 1998. She received her S.M.and Ph.D.in computer science from MIT in 2000 and 2004,respectively.

Location: Room 302 - H.R. Bright Building, Friday, May 09

Title: Sketch Recognition with Multiscale Stochastic Models of Temporal Patterns

Abstract: Sketching is a natural mode of interaction used in a variety of settings. For example,people sketch during early design and brainstorming sessions to guide the thought process;when we communicate certain ideas,we use sketching as an additional modality to convey ideas that can not be put in words. The emergence of hardware such as PDAs and Tablet PCs has enabled capturing freehand sketches,enabling the routine use of sketching as an additional human-computer interaction modality. But despite the availability of pen based information capture hardware,relatively little effort has been put into developing software capable of understanding and reasoning about sketches. To date,most approaches to sketch recognition have treated sketches as images (i.e.,static finished products) and have applied vision algorithms for recognition. However, unlike images, sketches are produced incrementally and interactively, one stroke at a time and their processing should take advantage of this. In this talk, I will describe ways of doing sketch recognition by extracting as much information as possible from temporal patterns that appear during sketching. I will present a sketch recognition framework based on hierarchical statistical models of temporal patterns. I will show that in certain domains,stroke orderings used in the course of drawing individual objects contain temporal patterns that can aid recognition. Build on this work,I illustrate how sketch recognition systems can use knowledge of both common stroke orderings and common object orderings. I will present a statistical framework based on Dynamic Bayesian Networks that can learn temporal models of object- level and stroke-level patterns for recognition. This framework supports multiobject strokes, multi-stroke objects,and allows interspersed drawing of objects – relaxing the assumption that objects are drawn one at a time. The system also supports real-valued feature representations using a numerically stable recognition algorithm. I will present recognition results for hand-drawn electronic circuit diagrams. The results show that modeling temporal patterns at multiple scales provides a significant increase in correct recognition rates,with no added computational penalties.

Bio: Dr. Sezgin graduated summa cum laude with Honors from Syracuse University in 1999. He received his MS in 2001 and his PhD in 2006, both from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Rainbow group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. His research interests include intelligent human-computer interfaces,multimodal sensor fusion, and HCI applications of machine learning.

Location: Room 302 - H.R. Bright Building, Friday, May 09