Research Group Projects and Descriptions

The Speech + Mobility group uses speech technologies and portable devices to enhance human communication and make digitized audio more useful as a data type. Our focus is on developing novel applications, user interfaces, and services to exploit computer speech processing for interacting with and through computers far removed from keyboards and monitors.

Audio conferences have a number of striking downsides—we lose many of the familiar physical signals from other people that help us judge what other people want to do. In this project, we explore how a new currency for conversation might be added to audio conferences to provide a new channel for non-verbal communication. We're experimenting with different uses for this currency, such as managing the agenda, conversation turn-taking, or length of speaking. Adding this currency provides participants with meaningful, non-verbal ways to communicate through giving currency to people in the meeting you want to support, or spending that currency to guide the meeting in directions in which you want it to move. Mediated environments typically lack these rich backchannels, and we hope that adding new kinds of channels will change the power structures in meetings in a positive way.

Inspired by the fact that people are communicating more and more through technology, Flickr This explores ways for people to have emotion-rich conversations through all kinds of media provided by people and technology—a way for technology to allow remote people to have conversations more like face-to-face experiences by grounding them in shared media. Flickr This lets viewable contents provide structure for a conversation; with a grounding on the viewable contents, conversation can move between synchronous and asynchronous, and evolve into a richer collaborative conversation/media.

Going My Way is a mobile user-aware route planner. The system collects GPS data of a user’s everyday locations and provides directions from an automatically selected set of landmarks that are close to the destination from the user’s frequently visited locations. When we ask our friends a direction, for example to the restaurant “Kaya” in Boston town, rather than describing the whole route, your friend probably would begin by asking you about other places, located near or on the way to the destination. Your friend may know you well enough to feel comfortable with guessing which places you are familiar with. By using the knowledge, your friend then provides you with directions from that personal landmark to the destination. We attempt to mimic the friend with Going My Way which 1) learns about where you travel 2) identifies the areas that are close to the desired destination from your frequent path 3) picks a set of landmarks to allow you to choose familiar one. When you select one of the provided landmarks, Going My Way will provide a direction from the chosen landmark to the destination.

Alumni Contributor(s): Chaochi Chang and Paulina Modlitba

Guiding Light is a navigation-based application that provides directions by projecting them onto physical spaces both indoors and outdoors. It enables a user to get relevant spatial information by using a mini projector in a cell phone. The core metaphor involved in this design is that of a flashlight which reveals objects in and information about the space it illuminates. For indoor navigation, Guiding Light uses a combination of an e-compass, an accelerometer, proximity sensors, and tags to appropriately place information. In contrast to existing heads-up displays that push information into the user's field of view, Guiding Light works on a pull principle relying entirely on users' requests and control of information.

A system that helps you beat impulse spending and save money by providing useful and persuasive information at the right time and place, using your mobile phone.

My Second-Bike is an interface for data visualization of relevant environmental sensor information and navigation cues. This is achieved through a 3-D simulation of the biker's riding path and surrounding environment. The physical interface is a bicycle which transmits pedal and handlebar control data to the simulation, thereby giving the user a sense of riding through the 3-D simulation. The 3-D environment gives the biker first-hand information of road conditions, lighting information, and environmental pollution— all of which may contribute to a better on-road experience. Further, this project could potentially allow bikers to co-ride with bikers in the real world by riding through the simulation. This project is part of the Copenhagen Bike Project, in collaboration with MIT's SENSEable City Lab.

We are flooded with information every instant; new email alerts, latest twitter updates, weather alerts, sports and the list goes on. While these alerts may intrude activities we're immersed in, there is still a desire to stay in touch with this ongoing noise. Radio Messenger is a new audio interface designed to deliver ambient and social information in a way to minimize the amount of time a user gets distracted from his primary task. This is achieved by interleaving this information with music listened to by the user in manner similar to a traditional radio. This will enable the user to listen and assimilate the alerts while tending to other tasks.

SpaceBox explores the addressing of location-specific messages (text, voice, images) to an intended recipient or group of recipients. Its key features include tagging places of interest when a sender is physically present at that location and projecting messages to a specific location. The recipient would receive such messages only when in the vicinity of the tagged location.

ToDoGo is a system for managing to-do lists on mobile devices. ToDoGo understands how to-do list entries relate to a user's everyday life activities, and can give them location-aware help in scheduling events and finding places to accomplish tasks.

This project describes the design and development of a system that will help to increase safety and security using cell phones. This system has two main components: a master phone application to assist people who need to take care of their loved ones, and a slave phone application to provide help to care-recipients who need attention from their caregivers. This system applies location awareness (GPS), awareness of social activities (communication activity and proximity with close peers), and peer-to-peer data communication as its core technologies.