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bwaber
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Name: Ben
Country: United States
State: Massachusetts
Metro: Boston
Gender: Male
Interests:
AI, ASL, Anime, Computer Vision, Frisbee, HCI, Hiking, Japanese, Programming, Games, Reading, Technology
Currently Reading:
Expertise in Context
Elements of Data Compression
Advances in Automatic Text Summarization
Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference
Foundations of Language : Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution
Blogs I Read:
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
7/21/2005
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zPrime
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| Graduation and New PapersGraduation from BU was yesterday, and I got the Research Achievement Award. It was really fun, although I guess I'll have another graduation in 4-5 (hopefully 4) years.
Anyway, I'll post a link to my master's project tomorrow. We just submitted a slimmed down version to the UI4ALL workshop, so hopefully I'll be able to go to Bonn next fall.
At MIT I've been working on modifying people's voice so that they sound more persuasive to their audience or attracted to the other conversation participant. It works surprisingly well, and we'll be running experiments later this week and next week to objectively show that these voice modifications actually work. I'll be giving a presentation at the Media Lab's sponsor week next week, so I should be able to post a PowerPoint presentation in a few days.
Finally, the belated debut of the ASL database site that I have been developing for a year will be tomorrow. The site allows you to easily search the largest online database of ASL linguistic information and video and download any amount of the database in an organized fashion. I'll post a link to the site tomorrow. Until then, stay tuned... | | |
| Master's Project Draft and Future ResearchWell, it's taken a long time, but I finally finished my Master's Project at BU. I've only got the first draft done, but it shouldn't be too much more work to finish it off, and I'll post the link to the final version once it's completed.
My project deals with creating web mediators, applications that sit on top of the web browser and HCI system to allow users, particularly those with disabilities, to have a more seemless interaction with the web. I discuss an original method for grouping links logically based on location and web page structure to allow users to select groups of links rather than a single one, as well as discuss some of the fundamental characteristics of pages on the web.
This project might be my final foray into problems of this nature, since at the Media Lab I'll start looking at how to make people's voices sound intersted/uninterested and persuasive/unpersuasive as well as tools for cross-cultural communication and education. I've actually been inspired by the work of Jeremy Bailenson and his fascinating work on virtual interactive environments. I've come to realize that the techinques he describes (some of which are available in this paper) can actually be applied in the real world, not just in virtual environments, with technology that is already available. When I start to get this research off the ground I'll post more...
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| I just found out that I was accepted to the MIT Media Lab. So next year I'll be a graduate student there working in the Human Dynamics Group and my advisor will be Prof. Sandy Pentland. I've wanted to work with him for a long time, and now I'll finally get my chance.
I'm still finishing up my Master's project at Boston University, and it's really close to completion. I'll post a link to my preliminary tech report that I wrote in November soon, and my presentation that I gave at the Computer Science Department's Industrial Affiliates Day (for a picture of me presenting, click here, you'll have to scroll down to see me since it's a high-res pic).
Stay tuned... | | |
| Push SinghSadly, the pioneering researcher in AI, Push Singh, passed away on February 28th. He was responsible for the Open Mind Common Sense project, ConceptNet, and is generally responsible for brining AI back to its pioneering past.
You can read more about him at the web page put up by the Media Lab. He was slated to become faculty there in 2007 to lead the Common Sense Computing group. The Media Lab has also created a memorial fund in his honor, and I hope that everyone would consider donating to honor this incredible person. Truly, the world lost something special when he left us. | | |
| Hugo Liu, Pattie Maes. "InterestMap: Harvesting Social Network Profiles for Recommendations." Proceedings of IUI Beyond Personalization 2005: A Workshop on the Next Stage of Recommender Systems Research, January 9, 2005, San Diego, CA, USA. pp. 54-59.
The authors prsent an intruiging method that creates a network of interests and social identities (where the weights of edges between network nodes denote the degree of relatedness) to facilitate recommender systems and as a method for determining a person's identity from some of their interests. This is a very interesting paper and, combined with some of the recent work on ConceptNet and the Alpiri Project, is part of the growing work that uses network models to acheive gains in performance over more statistically based methods. The ideas presented about the InterestMap structure are very interesting and further examination of this network structure may be useful.
PAPER RATING: 4 | | |
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