Month: March 2018

Paul Williams Seed Grant Recipients Announced

Zhaohui Wang

The ICC Executive Committee recently announced the winners of the 2018 Paul Williams Seed Grant Competition. Two awards of nearly $50K each were granted to two ICC teams with the primary purpose of giving researchers the opportunity to develop a research program that would be eligible and attractive for long-term and higher-level funding from external grants and contracts. Those submitting proposals for the grants were required to submit written proposals and to give a 2-5 minute presentation at the ICC TechTalks which took place on February 16, 2018. The winning teams are:

  • Zhaohui Wang and Nina Mahmoudian, The Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, “A Low-Cost Marine Mobile Networking Infrastructure,”
  • Keith Vertanen, Scott Kuhl, and Myounghoon “Philart” Jeon, The Center for Human Centered Computing, “Sensing and Feedback for On-Body Input”

Keith Vertanen Receives NSF CAREER Award

Keith Vertanen (CS/HCC) has been awarded a 2018 NSF CAREER Award for his project entitled, “Technology Assisted Conversations”.  This 5-year award has a total budget of $538,799. In this project, Keith will create new real-time communication solutions for people who face speaking challenges, including those with physical or cognitive disabilities. The primary goal of this project is to develop technology that improves upon the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices currently available to help people speak faster and more fluidly. Keith and his team will expand resources for research into conversational interactive systems, and will create a probabilistic text entry toolkit, AAC user interfaces, and an augmented reality conversation assistant. For more information, see the Michigan Tech News story.