Go to POSSCON.org for more details.

COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Jenay M. Beer School of Psychology Georgia Institute of Technology Date: March 20, 2013 Time: 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm) Place: Swearingen 2A31 Abstract Many older adults wish to remain in their own homes as they age. However, challenges threaten an older adult’s ability to age in place, and even healthy independently living older adults experience challenges in maintaining their home. Challenges with aging in place can be compensated through technology, such as home assistive robots. However, for home robots to be adopted by older adult users they must be designed to meet older adults’ needs for assistance and the older users must be amenable to robot assistance for those needs. In this talk, I will discuss a range of projects (both quantitative and qualitative in nature) assessing older adults’ social interpretation, attitudes, and acceptance of assistive robotics. Study findings suggest that older adults’ assistance preferences discriminated between tasks, and the data suggest insights as to why older adults hold such preferences. The talk will detail a multidisciplinary approach to studying human-robot interaction (HRI) and how findings from user studies can apply to preliminary design recommendations for future assistive robots to support aging in place. Jenay M. Beer is a 6th-year Ph.D. student in Engineering Psychology at Georgia Tech. She is a member of the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory, co-directed by Wendy A. Rogers and Arthur D. Fisk. Her research intersects the fields of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and Psychology. Specifically, she studies home-based robots designed to assist older adults to maintain their independence and age in place. She has studied a variety of robotic systems and topics such as emotion expression of agents, user acceptance of robots, healthcare robotics, and the role of robot autonomy in HRI. Jenay received a B.A. degree in Psychology from the University of Dayton, Ohio and an M.S. in Engineering Psychology from Georgia Tech.

COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Cory Henson Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing Wright State University Date: March 7, 2013 Time: 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm) Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge) Abstract There are an estimated 40+ billion sensors connected to mobile devices; and it has been predicted that within the next five years, sensor data from such devices will become the dominant type of information on the Web. For this data to be useful in applications, ranging from healthcare to environmental monitoring, it needs to be translated into higher-levels of abstraction (e.g., translated from observed symptoms to disorders). This act of translating low-level signals into high-level knowledge is called perception, and while people have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to efficiently perceive their environment, machines continue to struggle with the task. In this talk, I will describe a model of machine perception, Intellego, derived from cognitive theories of perception. Encoded in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), this model provides a formal semantics of perception by defining the information processes involved in collecting and interpreting heterogeneous sensor data. While the use of OWL enables advanced integration and interpretation of sensor data, the computational complexity of reasoning seriously limits its applicability and use within resource-constrained environments, such as mobile devices. To overcome this challenge, I will discuss an efficient implementation using bit-vector encodings and operations, resulting in order-of-magnitude improvements in both efficiency and scale. The applicability of this approach will be demonstrated through a real-world application in healthcare. This application, called kHealth (knowledge-enabled healthcare), provides a means for patients with chronic heart disease, and their doctors, to remotely monitor and manage their condition after release from the hospital. The kHealth application is expected to go into pre-clinical trials by the end of March. Cory Henson is a Ph.D. Candidate at Wright State University and a researcher at Kno.e.sis, the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled computing. He also works at Riverside Research, a research organization spun out of Columbia University, where he collaborates on projects for the DoD and Intelligence Community. He has bachelor's degrees in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Georgia. Cory's research revolves around Web-based data and metadata management, including knowledge representation, ontology modeling, data integration, and reasoning. More specifically, his research comprises the synergistic use of semantic web, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science to develop the theoretical foundation and practical tools needed to enable sensor data management and machine perception. This technology has exciting applications in developing smart environments and enabling more proactive, preventative healthcare. For more, see: http://knoesis.org/researchers/cory.

Dr. Barry Smyth of Dublin, Ireland, an internationally recognized leader in technology development, will be the featured guest speaker for the 2013 Delta Omega Lecture at noon on Friday, Feb. 22. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at noon in the Russell House Theater and is sponsored by the Arnold School of Public. The title of Smyth’s talk is “From the Sensor Web to Big Data: How the World of the Sensor Web Is Transforming How We Live, Work, and Play.” Smyth holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science at the University College Dublin. He is the director of CLARITY: The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Science and Engineering Technologies. More info

An ACM event (click me for more details):

The illustrious J.J. Shepherd will give us the skinny on software engineering.. As always, free pizza will be provided. Huzzah!

Preview what you will be doing in 490 and 492.

Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/ Hollings Room of the TCL, part of the Center for Digital Humanities’ Future Knowledge series: Google Books is a promising tool for the study of language change, and how it may relate to historical, societal, and cultural shifts. However, the standard Google Books interface to the n-grams data only provides the most rudimentary of searches, and so much more could and should be done with the massive amount of data. In this presentation, I will discuss an alternative interface for the Google Books data (googlebooks.byu.edu), which provide a much wider range of searches -- incorporating collocates, searching by part of speech, and an integrated thesaurus -- all of which provide much more insight into cultural changes than are possible with the simple, standard Google Books interface.

Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/ Large, robust corpora allow us to map linguistic changes in languages, in ways that would have been considered impossible just 10-20 years ago. In this presentation, I will examine how the Corpus del Español (100 million words, 1200s-1900s) and the Corpus do Português (45 million words, 1300s-1900s) can be used to examine a wide range of linguistic changes -- lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. I will also compare these resources with corpora that allow a much smaller range of searches, such as the CORDE from the Real Academia Española. Finally, I will look at the new googlebooks.byu.edu interface, which allows access to 45 *billion* words of Spanish from the 1500s-2000s. This improves greatly on the standard, simple Google Books interface, and it also allows for research on an extremely wide range of changes in Spanish.