Abstract

Daniel Dewey and Tom Stepleton's work this summer builds upon V-Unit projects conducted during Spring and Summer 2006 by Nidhi Kalra, Robotics Institute Ph.D. graduate and Tom Lauwers, Robotics Institute Ph.D. student which launched the Adaptive Braille Writing Tutor Project through TechBridgeWorld. The project was field tested in collaboration with the Mathru School for the Blind near Bangalore, India and was received with great enthusiasm.

More details on the Adaptive Braille Writing Tutor Project are available at: http://www.techbridgeworld.org/brailletutor

Speaker Bios

Daniel Dewey is an undergraduate in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department double-majoring in Computer Science and Philosophy. He has been awarded an Intel First Year Research Experience grant to support this summer's project work. He is currently working with M. Bernardine Dias and Tom Stepleton within the Adaptive Braille Writing Tutor Project to develop intelligent tutoring software for Braille education in developing communities. This project interests him because it offers potential for impact and an opportunity to explore computer-assisted technology and non-visual models of human-computer interaction. Daniel hopes to study language design and programming methodology in order to see how computers can make our lives more rewarding.

Tom Stepleton is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His main area of interest is object recognition and model learning in computational and biological vision systems, which he pursues in the lab of Dr. Tai Sing Lee. For his thesis, Tom is developing a system which performs unsupervised learning of object models from video data. Additionally, because he intends to teach after graduation, Tom is volunteering extra time to collaborate with Daniel Dewey in extending the Adaptive Braille Writing Tutor Project to multiuser settings. He views this effort as a prototype for a variety of socially aware, single-student research projects that he hopes to offer to undergraduates in his future career. Originally from St. Louis, MO, Tom attended Swarthmore College, graduating in 2002 with a Computer Science major and Philosophy minor.