Day: November 13, 2012

Chadde Presents Family Engineering at SWE

Family EngineeringEducation Program Coordinator Joan Chadde attended the 2012 Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Conference in Houston. Chadde co-presented “Get ‘Em While They’re Young with Family Engineering” with chemical engineering major Kerstin Cleveland, as well at the SWE Outreach Expo and the Invent It. Build It! session for middle school girls and parents to promote the Family Engineering program.

From Tech Today.

CLS Hosts Kelly Steelman

The Department of Cognitive and Learning Sciences will host Kelly Steelman from 11:05 to 11:55 a.m., Wednesday, Nov. 14, in Rekhi G06. Steelman will provide a research presentation, “Modeling Attention in Complex Workspaces.”

Steelman holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign along with an MS in Human Factors from the University of Illinois and a MS in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher conducting research on human factors and applied cognition at Flinders University in South Australia. Her research interests include: basic and applied attention, models of attention, human performance in aviation, instructional design and display design.

From Tech Today.

For more information, contact Associate Professor Susan Amato-Henderson at slamato@mtu.edu .

Human Interface Design Enterprise and World Usability Day

World Usability Day 2012Thursday was Usability Day around the world, and this was the fifth year Michigan Tech was involved. The event celebrates usability, when technologies or procedures make sense to us and when we can learn–and remember–how to use them, make few errors and feel satisfied with our experiences.

The Human Interface Design Enterprise was showing off their driver simulator in Rekhi Hall.

It was one of a couple of major projects the group has taken on, according to Margo Woller-Carter, a PhD student in applied cognitive science and human factors.

“We are using a Uconnect system from Chrysler to test for driver distraction,” she said. “We designed this driver simulator to use with it, and we will also be doing some eye-tracking for them.” Uconnect was a multimedia system on steroids: entertainment, phone, navigation, voice command, controls, and wifi: perfect for testing for distractions. The Enterprise was in the second year of a three-year contract with Chrysler.

Read more at Tech Today, by Dennis Walikainen.