Category: Research

A paper authored by Michigan Tech Assistant Professor Bo Chen, Computer Science, and Data Science master’s student Shashank Reddy Danda, has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Internet of Things Magazine special issue on Smart IoT Solutions for Combating COVID-19 Pandemic. The special issue will be published in September 2020.

The title of the paper is,

The paper, “Towards Mitigating Spreading of Coronavirus via Mobile Devices,” focuses on Chen’s research of COVID-19 prevention through the leveraging of computing technology. The project is currently supported by a Michigan Tech College of Computing seed grant, and external funding for further development is being pursued.

Download a preprint of the paper here.

Abstract:
Recently, the impact of coronavirus has been witnessed by almost every country around the world. To mitigate spreading of coronavirus, a fundamental strategy would be reducing the chance of healthy people from being exposed to it. Having observed the fact that most viruses come from coughing/sneezing/runny nose of infected people, in this work we propose to detect such symptom events via mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, smart watches, and other IoT devices) possessed by most people in modern world and, to instantly broadcast locations where the symptoms have been observed to other people. This would be able to significantly reduce risk that healthy people get exposed to the viruses. The mobile devices today are usually equipped with various sensors including microphone, accelerometer, and GPS, as well as network connection (4G, LTE, Wi-Fi), which makes our proposal feasible. Further experimental evaluation shows that coronavirus-like symptoms (coughing/sneezing/runny nose) can be detected with an accuracy around 90%; in addition, the dry cough (more likely happening to COVID-19 patients) and wet cough can also be differentiated with a high accuracy.

Bo Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His areas of expertise include mobile device security, cloud computing security, named data networking security, big data security, and blockchain.

Shashank Reddy Danda is an MS student in Data Science. He is currently working as a research assistant in MTU Security and Privacy (SnP) Lab under the supervision of Dr. Bo Chen.

IEEE Internet of Things Magazine (IEEE IoTM) is a publication of the IEEE Internet of Things Initiative, a Multi-Society Technical Group.

Dr. Timothy Havens (ICC), Dr. Andrew Barnard (GLRC), Dr. Guy Meadows (GLRC), and Dr. Gowtham (IT/ECE) have been awarded an Office of Naval Research DURIP grant titled, “Acoustic Sensing System and High-Throughput Computing Environment and Threat Monitoring in Naval Environments Using Machine Learning.”

The $243,169 award will fund procurement of new high throughput computing and underwater acoustic sensing systems for use by researchers at Michigan Tech.

The Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) supports universities through awards meant to build the infrastructures necessary for relevant, high-quality Navy research.

We believe that these resources will considerably multiply our capability and productivity in assisting the U.S. Navy, and DoD at large, to move forward on numerous fronts. We have excellent resources, but lack some infrastructure capabilities to make a leap in theory and applications.

Timothy Havens, Director, Institute of Computing and Cybersystems

Havens says that the award supports two active U.S. Navy projects in particular, “ONR Graduate Traineeship Award: Multi-Modal, Near-Shore, Ice-Covered Arctic Acoustic Propagation Measurements and Analysis (ONR #N00014-18-1-2592)” and “Localization, Tracking, and Classification of On-Ice and Underwater Noise Sources Using Machine Learning (US NSWC #N00174-19-1-0004).”

“With this new equipment we can begin to conduct more detailed, realistic, and repeatable sensor/target experiments, and facilitate expansion of current research into related areas of interest to the DoD, such as deep learning with digital phased arrays and persistent, distributed sensing with sensor arrays,” Havens notes.

“The equipment will significantly enhance Michigan Tech capabilities for six other Department of Defense (DoD)-funded projects as well, including NGA, SPAWAR, and DARPA awards,” he adds.

Finally, through graduate student participation in the research, and collaboration with the undergraduate SENSE Enterprise at Michigan Tech (Strategic Education through Naval Systems Experiences), the equipment will augment Navy STEM education and future workforce development.

Tim Havens is associate dean for research, College of Computing, the William and Gloria Jackson Associate Professor of Computer Systems, and director of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems.

Andrew Barnard is director of the Great Lakes Research Center,
associate professor, Mechanical Engineering—Engineering Mechanic, and Faculty advisor to the undergraduate SENSE Enterprise.

Guy Meadows is director of the Marine Engineering Laboratory, the Robbins Professor of Sustainable Marine Engineering, and a research professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics.

Gowtham is director of research computing for Michigan Tech’s Information Technology department; an adjunct assistant professor, Physics; a research associate professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering; and an NSF XSEDE Campus Champion.

The Institute of Computing and Cyberersystems (ICC) promotes collaborative, cross-disciplinary research and learning experiences through six research centers in the areas of computing education, cyber-physical systems, cybersecurity, data sciences, human-centered computing, and scalable architectures and systems, for the benefit of Michigan Technological University and society at large.

The ICC’s 55 members represent more than 20 academic disciplines at Michigan Tech. Member scientists are collaborating to conduct impactful research, make valuable contributions in the field of computing, and solve problems of critical national importance.

The Great Lakes Research Center (GLRC) provides state-of-the-art laboratories to support research on a broad array of topics. Faculty members from many departments across Michigan Technological University’s campus collaborate on interdisciplinary research, ranging from air–water interactions to biogeochemistry to food web relationships.

One of the GLRC’s most important functions is to educate the scientists, engineers, technologists, policymakers, and stakeholders of tomorrow about the Great Lakes basin. The Center for Science and Environmental Outreach provides K–12 student, teacher, and community education/outreach programs, taking advantage of the Center’s many teaching labs.

The GLRC also contains a lake-level marine facility and convenient deep-water docking, providing a year-round home for Michigan Tech’s surface and sub-surface fleet of marine vehicles.

Professor Yu Cai, Applied Computing, a member of the ICC’s Center for Cybersecurity, is the principal investigator on a two-year project that has received a $99,942 grant from the National Security Agency (GenCyber). The project is titled, “GenCyber Teacher Camp at Michigan Tech. “

Lecturer Tim Van Wagner (AC) and Assistant Professor Bo Chen (CS, DataS) are Co-PIs. Yu Cai will serve as the camp director, Tim Van Wagner as lead instructor.

This GenCyber project aims to host a week-long, residential summer camp for twenty K-12 STEM teachers in 2021 at Michigan Tech. Target educators are primarily from Michigan and surrounding states.

The objectives of the camp are to teach cybersecurity knowledge and safe online behavior, develop innovative teaching methods for delivering cybersecurity content, and provide professional development opportunities so participants will return to their home schools with contagious enthusiasm about teaching cybersecurity.

The GenCyber camp will be offered at no cost to camp participants. Room and board will be provided. Teacher participants will receive a stipend of $500 for attending and completing camp activities.

Read about the 2019 Michigan Tech GenCyber camps for teachers and students here.

Greetings College of Computing students. Welcome to the Fall 2020 semester.

College of Computing faculty recorded these 25 videos to introduce themselves to you and the College. We hope you’ll take a look.

Your professors share info about their courses and research, the Computing clubs and Enterprise groups they advise, College outreach and volunteering opportunities, and even a little something about themselves. Enjoy.

View all 25 Fall 2020 faculty videos here.

Play – Meet Your Professors in the Michigan Tech College of Computing

Find contact info for your Computing professors in the Faculty Directory.

Timothy Havens (DataS/CC) and Anthony Pinar (DataS/ECE) are co-authors of a paper, written in collaboration with University of Missouri researchers Muhammad Islam, Derek Anderson, Grant Scott, and Jim Keller, that has been published in the July 2020 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

The article is titled, “Enabling explainable fusion in deep learning with fuzzy integral neural networks.” Link to the article here. See the abstract below.

Abstract
Information fusion is an essential part of numerous engineering systems and biological functions, e.g., human cognition. Fusion occurs at many levels, ranging from the low-level combination of signals to the high-level aggregation of heterogeneous decision-making processes. While the last decade has witnessed an explosion of research in deep learning, fusion in neural networks has not observed the same revolution. Specifically, most neural fusion approaches are ad hoc, are not understood, are distributed versus localized, and/or explainability is low (if present at all). Herein, we prove that the fuzzy Choquet integral (ChI), a powerful nonlinear aggregation function, can be represented as a multilayer network, referred to hereafter as ChIMP.

We also put forth an improved ChIMP (iChIMP) that leads to a stochastic-gradient-descent-based optimization in light of the exponential number of ChI inequality constraints. An additional benefit of ChIMP/iChIMP is that it enables explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). Synthetic validation experiments are provided, and iChIMP is applied to the fusion of a set of heterogeneous architecture deep models in remote sensing. We show an improvement in model accuracy, and our previously established XAI indices shed light on the quality of our data, model, and its decisions.

Citation
M. Islam, D. T. Anderson, A. J. Pinar, T. C. Havens, G. Scott and J. M. Keller, “Enabling Explainable Fusion in Deep Learning With Fuzzy Integral Neural Networks,” in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, vol. 28, no. 7, pp. 1291-1300, July 2020, doi: 10.1109/TFUZZ.2019.2917124.

Dr. Timothy Havens presented the lead talk at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s ISR-2 Seminar Series on Advancing Toward Modern Detection and Estimation Techniques for Multi-Sensor Scenarios, presented online on July 9, 2020.

Tim Havens is associate dean for research for the College of Computing, director of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC), and the William and Gloria Jackson Associate Professor of Computer Systems.

The talk, “Explainable Deep Fusion,” described Havens’s sensor fusion systems research that seeks to combine cooperative and complementary sources to achieve optimal inference from pooled evidence.

Havens specifically discussed his innovations in non-linear aggregation learning with Choquet integrals and their applications in deep learning and Explainable AI.

The Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) has announced the addition of the Computing Education Center (CEC). Professor Yu Cai, Applied Computing, is director of the new center.

“A special thanks to Yu Cai for stepping forward to lead this effort,” said Tim Havens, director of the ICC and associate dean for research, College of Computing.

“This has been discussed for a few years, and I’m excited about the group of people that has come together in this center,” Havens added. “I look forward to hearing about their successes.”

The ICC is funded in large part through returns on grant overhead and expenditures (F&A). Commonly called IRAD funds, these quarterly distributions are allocated among the six ICC centers according to their respective research expenditures that quarter.

The Michigan Tech Vice President for Research office has announced the Spring 2020 Research Excellence Fund (REF) awards.

Among the recipients is Assistant Professor Weihua Zhou, Applied Computing/Health Informatics, who received a Portage Health Foundation Research Seed Grant.

Zhou’s areas of expertise include image processing and computer vision, machine learning, medical image analysis, health informatics, and text mining.

The proposed project represents Zhou’s continuous research on cardiac resynchronization therapy for patients with heart failure.

His co-investigators are Associate Professor Qing-Hui Chen, M.D., Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology, and Timothy Havens, the William and Gloria Jackson Associate Professor, College of Computing.

Ph.D. candidate Zhuo He, College of Computing, is a research assistant on the project. Rudy Evonich, MD, a cardiologist with the Department of Cardiology at UP Health System Marquette, Mich., is a clinical consultant.

Read the Tech Today announcement here.

Learn more about Michigan Tech REF awards here.

Signature Research Inc. has partnered with Michigan Technological University to accomplish a Phase II STTR project sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The two-year, $1 Million project is titled, “Algorithms for Look-Down Infrared Target Exploitation-Phase II.” Michigan Tech’s portion of the $1 million contract is $400K.

Principal investigator of the project is Dr. Timothy Havens, director of the Institute of Computing and Cyberystems (ICC) and associate dean of research for the College of Computing. Havens is joined by Signature Research, Inc. (SGR) Program Manager Matt Blanck, who will lead the SGR side of the project.

At Tech, Havens will be assisted in accomplishing the goals of this project by Research Scientist Adam Webb of the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) and Nicholas Hamilton, a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate.

“This project will identify physics-based novel signatures and data processing techniques to exploit overhead infrared (IR) imagery using machine learning algorithms.”

“The SGR/MTU Team will generate, collect, and label a wide body of data, implement learning algorithms, develop use cases and tests on those data, and perform a comprehensive study to determine ways in which learning algorithms can automate IR imagery recognition tasks.”

Dr. Timothy Havens

And while this effort is focused on overhead IR imagery, Havens says the methods and software developed will have applicability to other sensing modalities, leading to investigations of multi-modal fusion of all-source data.

Signature Research, Inc. (SGR) solutions to DoD and Intelligence Community customers, and specializes in in Signature Phenomenology, Analysis, and Modeling of items of military interest covering the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a combat support agency under the United States Department of Defense and a member of the United States Intelligence Community, with the primary mission of collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence in support of national security.

The Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) promotes research and learning experiences in the areas of cyber-physical systems, cybersecurity, data sciences, human-centered computing, and scalable architectures and systems for the benefit of Michigan Tech and society at large.

The Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) is an innovator in building information from data through the marriage of phenomenological understanding and implementation of mathematically rigorous algorithms. Together with University and other national and international collaborators, MTRI researchers and scientists work to solve critical problems in national security, protecting and evaluating critical infrastructure, bioinformatics, Earth sciences, and environmental processes, according to their website.

Written by Karen S. Johnson, Communications Director, College of Computing

Computer Science master’s student and doctoral candidate Dylan Gaines is one of three Michigan Tech students recently awarded a multi-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. 

The oldest STEM-related fellowship program in the United States, the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes exceptional graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines early in their career and supports them through graduate education.

NSF-GRFP fellows are an exceptional group; 42 fellows have gone on to become Nobel Laureates, and about 450 fellows are members of the National Academy of Sciences.

The additional Michigan Tech graduate students who received the fellowship are Greta Colford ’19 (Mechanical Engineering) and Seth Kriz (Chemical Engineering).

The fellowship provides three years of financial support, including a $34,000 annual stipend for each fellow and a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance for the fellow’s institution. In addition to financial support, the GRFP provides opportunities for research in national laboratories and international research.

Read an April 15, 2020, Tech Today article about this here.

Four years, two degrees

Gaines, who arrived as a first-year student in fall 2016, was awarded the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in spring 2019, also completing a concentration in Game Development. He’s pursuing on his master’s now, which he expects to complete in December 2020. He has also begun working on his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Michigan Tech, which he anticipates completing in spring 2023.

Commenting on Gaines’ award, Department of Computer Science Chair Dr. Linda Ott says, “All of us in the Department of Computer Science are very excited that Dylan is being awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This is clear affirmation that Dylan is an excellent student, and that even as an undergraduate he demonstrated strong research skills.”

“I am very thankful for this award, and for everyone that supported me through the application process and helped to review my essays” Gaines says.

Early interest, a first-year research assistant

Ott notes that it is also a tribute to Gaines’s advisor, CS Associate Professor Keith Vertanen who has established a very successful research group in intelligent interactive systems.

“Dr. Ott encouraged the pursuit of research in her CS 1000 class by bringing in faculty like Dr. Vertanen to present what they were working on,” Gaines says. “Because of this, I started doing research with Dr. Vertanen my first semester at Michigan Tech, and he has been nothing but supportive the whole time,” adding, “all of the faculty and staff at Michigan Tech are very supportive of students and make teaching a priority.”

Vertanen recalls that in fall 2017, Gaines approached him following a talk about Vertanen’s research in the CS department’s first-year seminar class.

“I was so impressed by him that I subsequently hired him as an undergraduate research assistant, something I would normally not do with a first-year student,” Vertanen confirms. “Since then, he has been a key contributor to my research group.”

“It became quickly clear to me he was a talented, hard-working, and curious researcher,” Vertanen says. I was pleased to learn NSF recognized this, as well, by awarding him a GRF. I’m excited to see what he’ll accomplish during his Ph.D.”

Text entry techniques

Gaines’s research with Vertanen focuses on text entry techniques for those with visual impairments. His master’s and doctoral research will continue this work. He also plans to develop assistive technologies for use in Augmented Reality. 

His aim is to make smartphones—and technology in general—more accessible for people with visual impairments. Looking ahead, Gaines definitely wants to continue to pursue research, but he’s unsure yet if it will be in academia or in industry. “At this time, I am open to both possibilities,” he says.

In his first two years at Michigan Tech, Gaines was instrumental in research leading to two papers accepted for the 2018 and 2019 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, with acceptance rates of 24% and 26%, respectively. For both papers, Vertanen notes that Dylan helped design and execute the user studies, and also provided careful feedback that improved the submitted papers, the rebuttals, and the final papers. CHI is the flagship conference in human-computer interaction.

During his undergraduate studies, Gaines worked with Vertanen on his NSF project, “CAREER: Technology Assisted Conversations.” In the first year of his PhD, he worked on two NSF projects with Vertanen, “CHS: Small: Rich Surface Interaction for Augmented Environments” and “CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Improving Mobile Device Input for Users who are Blind or Low Vision.” 

Gaines plans to continue his research in line with the above project, “Improving Mobile Device Input for Users who are Blind or Low Vision,” though now funded by the GRF. See below for more information about the research projects.

“Dylan is one of the strongest and easiest to work with students I have encountered in over ten years of advising undergraduate research students,” Vertanen concludes. “I have no doubt he will produce an exciting and impactful portfolio of research during his Ph.D. studies.”\

An active life

Gaines is an active member of Triangle Fraternity, which he says helped to shape who he is as a person and as a scholar. Triangle is a fraternity of engineers, architects, and scientists that develop balanced men who cultivate high moral character, foster lifelong friendships, and live their lives with integrity, according to the organizations’ website.

As an undergraduate, Gaines was active in the Organization for Information Systems, and he served on the Dean’s Student Advisory Council. He also participated for three years in Husky Game Development (HGD) Enterprise, capping his final year as HGD president and coordinating 66 students on 12 teams. In HGD, student teams design and build video games, often in collaboration with sponsors and alumni.

In summer 2019, he helped with a week-long Computer Science department Summer Youth Program for high school girls, assisting in development of the web API used in their projects, and helping the girls build their mobile apps.

Gaines competed in three seasons for the Huskies as a member of the cross country and track teams, Now, he’s a graduate assistant coach for the team. “I started running cross country about nine years ago,” Gaines affirms. “I ran in the 8k and the 3k steeplechase on the MTU team for three years during my undergrad. I have loved watching the Cross program grow and improve throughout my time here.”

View Gaines’s Michigan Tech Cross Country record here.

Trust, a novel interface, peer mentoring

As a third-year undergrad, Gaines conducted his own research project investigating a novel interface for eye-free text entry, developing an Android application and integrating it with the statistical decoder used in Vertanen’s research group.

“This decoder has evolved over many years and has served as the basis for a variety of projects,” Vertanen explains. “As such, it has a large code base with a complex API. Despite this, Dylan was able to incorporate the decoder into his project with only minimal guidance. He asked questions when stuck, but almost always figured out solutions on his own. His software engineering skills are excellent and he is one of the few students I trust to make changes to the decoder.”

An application programming interface, or API, is a computing interface which defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, among other functions.

Upon completing the prototype of his eyes-free text entry interface, Gaines designed and conducted a longitudinal user study. 

“In designing the experimental methodology for his study, he routinely challenged me with probing and insightful questions about how the study should be designed,” Vertanen says. “I felt like I was working with a senior Ph.D. student rather than an undergraduate. I cannot overstate how impressive this is; many students just blindly follow my suggestions, even my bad ones! Now, whenever I design a new user study, I always discuss it with Dylan as this helps refine the design and spot problems.”

Vertanen also asks his other students to pilot their studies with Gaines, as he often provides feedback that improves their studies.

ACM ASSETS 2018

Gaines’s eyes-free text entry interface work culminated in his solo submission to the ACM ASSETS 2018 Student Research Competition (SRC), “Exploring an Ambiguous Technique for Eyes-Free Mobile Text Entry.” And his related technical paper was accepted by the SRC competition, which had a 50% acceptance rate.

In October 2018, Vertanen and Gaines traveled to Galway, Ireland, where Gaines presented a poster and a talk at ASSETS 2018 about his interface, Tap123. Tap123 offers the potential for faster and easier-to-learn text input for users who are visually impaired. ACM ASSETS is the premier venue for research on assistive technologies and accessible computing.

“His writing skills are excellent; he produced a quality paper with minimal guidance from me,” says Vertanen of Gaines’s ASSETS 2018 participation. “At his poster presentation, he did an excellent job communicating his research and answering questions, and he advanced to the final round, where he gave an excellent talk to the entire conference, winning third-place in the undergraduate category.

Significant impact, contribution

Vertanen reflects that while Gaines is clearly very bright, he also demonstrates an ability to critically assess his understanding of a topic and asked questions whenever he suspects his solutions might be incorrect. 

In his role as Dylan’s research advisor, Vertanen encouraged Dylan, when writing he was writing his research plan, to not only incorporate feedback he received presenting at ASSETS, but also to think about how his work might be relevant in a post-mobile phone world.  I was pleased with the research plan he created,” Vertanen says.

Vertanen predicts that Gaines’s planned work will significantly impact the utility of future AR interfaces for people with visual impairments, adding, “More broadly, his work may also impact everyone, since limitations of device or situation may make audio-only AR an attractive alternative to visual-based AR interaction”

And Gaines has a head start on the publication process. “Throughout his time in my group, he has shown a keen interest in the academic publication process,” Vertanen says of Gaines. “This has already manifested itself; as a first-year Ph.D. student he has one paper in submission and another ready for submission.”

With this publication experience and motivation, Vertanen expects that Gaines’s Ph.D. research will be disseminated widely. Further, this work on interfaces for those with disabilities will provide motivating material in the College of Computing’s ongoing efforts to recruit students who are typically underrepresented in computer science.

NSF Research Projects

CAREER: Technology Assisted Conversations
Sponsor: NSF
PI: Keith Vertanen
Abstract: Face-to-face conversation is an important way in which people communicate with each other, but unfortunately there are millions who suffer from disorders that impede normal conversation. This project will explore new real-time communication solutions for people who face speaking challenges, including those with physical or cognitive disabilities, for example by exploiting implicit and explicit contextual input obtained from a person’s conversation partner.

The goal is to develop technology that improves upon the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices currently available to help people speak faster and more fluidly. The PI will assemble teams of undergraduates to develop the project’s software, and he will host a summer youth program on the technology behind text messaging, offering scholarships for women, students with disabilities, and students from underrepresented groups. Funded first-year research opportunities will further help retain undergraduates, particularly women, in computing.

CHS: Small: Rich Surface Interaction for Augmented Environments
Sponsor: NSF
PI: Keith Vertanen
Co-PI: Scott Kuhl
The preliminary data for this project was developed through an Institute of Computing and Cybersystems faculty seed grant funded by Michigan Tech alumnus Paul Williams. Read a blog post about this research here.
Abstract: Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) head-mounted displays are increasingly being used in different computing related activities such as data visualization, education, and training. Currently, VR and AR devices lack efficient and ergonomic ways to perform common desktop interactions such as pointing-and-clicking and entering text. 

The goal of this project is to transform flat, everyday surfaces into a rich interactive surface. For example, a desk or a wall could be transformed into a virtual keyboard. Flat surfaces afford not only haptic feedback, but also provide ergonomic advantages by providing a place to rest your arms. This project will develop a system where microphones are placed on surfaces to enable the sensing of when and where a tap has occurred. Further, the system aims to differentiate different types of touch interactions such as tapping with a fingernail, tapping with a finger pad, or making short swipe gestures. This project will investigate different machine learning algorithms for producing a continuous coordinate for taps on a surface along with associated error bars.

CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Improving Mobile Device Input for Users who are Blind or Low Vision. 
Sponsor: NSF
PI: Keith Vertanen
Abstract: Smartphones are an essential part of everyday life. But for people with visual impairments, basic tasks like composing text messages or browsing the web can be prohibitively slow and difficult. The goal of this project is to develop accessible text entry methods that will enable people with visual impairments to enter text at rates comparable to sighted people. This project will design new algorithms and feedback methods for today’s standard text entry approaches of tapping on individual keys, gesturing across keys, or dictating via speech.

Publications by Dylan Gaines

Vertanen, K., ​Gaines, D.​, Fletcher, C., Stanage, A., Watling, R., Krisstensson, P.O. 2019. VelociWatch: Designing and Evaluating a Virtual Keyboard for the Input of Challenging Text. In ​Proceedings of The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘19)​.

Gaines, D., Exploring an Ambiguous Technique for Eyes-Free Mobile Text Entry. 2018. In ​Proceedings of the 20t​ h​ International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility Student Research Competition​ ​(ASSETS ‘18)​.

Vertanen, K., Fletcher, C., ​Gaines, D.​, Gould, J., Kristensson, P.O. 2018. The Impact of Word, Multiple Word, and Sentence Input on Virtual Keyboard Decoding Performance. In ​Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems​ ​(CHI ‘18)​.

More Background

The Deans’ Student Advisory Council, College of Business, serves to foster effective communication among the Dean’s Office, faculty, and students, and provide advice to the Dean on matters relating to undergraduate business education and the College community.

Husky Game Development Enterprise (HGD). The mission of HGD is to design and develop games for business, education, and fun. We work as an interdisciplinary, student-run enterprise that fosters productivity, creativity, and effective business practices. Our goal is to create quality software that will attract and satisfy industry sponsors.

The Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) is the research arm of the Michigan Tech College of Computing. It leads and promotes opportunities for faculty and students to work across organizational boundaries to create an environment that is a reflection of the contemporary technological innovation that mirrors today’s industry and society.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports individuals early in their graduate training in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

The Organization for Information Systems (OIS) is a student organization focused on the technical and professional development of its members.

Triangle Fraternity was founded in 1907 by sixteen engineers at the University of Illinois.  From the start, it was meant to be a place where men of similar majors could socialize, support each other’s academic pursuits and better prepare themselves for successful careers.  Since that time, our membership has grown and expanded to include mathematics and the physical sciences as well as architecture, making us STEM long before the term was coined in 2001. Today, we continue to provide a unique social, academic and professional experience for STEM majors.