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Human cues to improve computer's user-friendliness
Monday, 07 March 2011, 15:09 IST
Washington: Researchers are using human cues to improve a computer's user-friendliness by going beyond the scope of the traditional keyboard and mouse.
"Our research in computer graphics and computer vision tries to make using computers easier," says Lijun Yin, a Binghamton University computer scientist.
"Can we find a more comfortable, intuitive and intelligent way to use the computer? It should feel like you're talking to a friend. This could also help disabled people use computers the way everyone else does."
Yin's team has developed ways to provide information to a computer, based on where the user is looking as well as through his gestures or speech. One of the basic challenges in this area is "computer vision", according to a Binghamton University statement.
That is, how can a simple webcam work more like the human eye? Can camera-captured data understand a real-world object? Can this data be used to "see" the user and "understand" what the user wants to do?
To some extent, that's already possible. One of Yin's graduate students used only his eyes to highlight content on various slides during a presentation for the US Air Force experts last year.
Yin says the next step would be to enable the computer to recognize a user's emotional state.
He works with a well-established set of six basic emotions, anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise, and is experimenting with different ways to allow the computer to distinguish among them.
"Computers only understand zeroes and ones," Yin says. "Everything is about patterns. We want to find out how to recognise each emotion using only the most important features."
He's partnering with Binghamton University psychologist Peter Gerhardstein to explore ways this work could benefit children with autism.
Source: IANS
Source: IANS
