Project Abstracts

DeSIGN: An Intelligent Tutor for American Sign Language

DeSIGN is an educational software designed to intelligently reinforce vocabulary and American Sign Language signs for deaf students in middle school. The motivation for this V-Unit project is to raise the reading comprehension level of deaf students graduating from high school, and enhance their participation in society. This software is designed to have an interactive tutor interface and includes a game. This work is done in collaboration with the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Pittsburgh.

BlindAid: Navigational Assistance for the Visually Impaired

The goal of BlindAid is to develop navigational assistance technology for the blind or visually impaired. We seek to create a portable Electronic Travel Aid (ETA) for visually impaired users, along with the accompanying radio frequency identification (RFID) localization infrastructure used to equip buildings.

There has been little done in regards to indoor navigation in current assistive technologies, known as Electronic Orientation Aids (EOA), possibly due to high cost for instrumentation and limited capabilities. BlindAid's goal is to break down these barriers by introducing an EOA system which is relatively inexpensive for both the blind and the businesses that equip their buildings. We propose using RFID tags to set up a location-tagging infrastructure within buildings such that the blind can use an RFID equipped ETA (such as a cell phone) to determine their location as well as software that can utilize this localization data to generate vocal directions to reach a destination.

Speaker Bios

Vinithra Varadharajan, a Masters Student at the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, is a recipient of the 2006 Google Anita Borg scholarship. Her current research is on the Haptic Rendering and Psychophysical Evaluation of a Virtual Three-Dimensional Helical Spring. In the summer of 2003 she taught English to a class of under-privileged middle-school blind students in India. She has also given presentations on India to high-school students in Pittsburgh as a volunteer for the World Affairs Council.

Ling Xu is a Ph.D. Student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 2004. She worked for a year in industry before joining the Robotics Institute as a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship recipient. Her research focuses on path planning for air and ground robots. She also co-heads Creative Tech Nights, an outreach program to introduce middle and high school girls to Computer Science.

Sandra Mau is a Masters Student in her second year at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. She has an interest in developing technologies that help people in their daily lives. Sandra received her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in Engineering Science with a concentration in Aerospace Engineering. Her thesis area of research is human-robot interaction in multirobot supervisory control teams, advised by John Dolan.

Maxim Makatchev spent his childhood in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He graduated from Moscow State University, with a diploma in Applied Mathematics. He continued his studies graduating as an MPhil in Mechatronics from City University of Hong Kong and then worked for several years as a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center, developing natural language understanding components for dialogue-based tutoring systems. He is currently a first year Ph.D. Student at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and his interests include machine learning, natural language dialogue and human-robot interaction.

Nik Melchior is a third year Ph.D. Student at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His research interests include path planning for rovers in rough terrain, as well as cooperation and communication within human/robot teams. Nik received his bachelor's degree in computer engineering and master's degree in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis.