Technology and UI design for seniors

So my grandma, who is going to be spending a few months in my house with my mother, opened her first email account today. It got me thinking about how we need to design intuitive interfaces for seniors (or anyone new to computers) to start learning how to use technology. I think far fewer older people use computers and the Internet than the number that can benefit from and contribute their knowledge and experience to the rest of the world. It could be a great way for them to spend time, share their experiences, keep in touch with family around the world. One of the things my other grandparents used to enjoy doing was looking at photos of their children and grandkids on the computer.

You can argue that the next generation (my parents) are already used to computers, so we can stop worrying about this problem. But every day, there are new devices replacing existing ones. We need to make it easier for anyone not familiar with such devices or interaction mechanisms to learn how to use them.

It would be great if we can come up with interfaces that are so intuitive, or that mimic human-human interaction so closely, that there is no “learning” required to be able to use them.

Or, maybe all that is needed is an enthusiastic student and a good teacher. My grandma has learned from my mother how to type and use Google Indic transliteration to type in Kannada in one day. She is now sending me chats in Kannada (which I cannot read) on Google chat :)

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Ethnologue

I’ve been reading The Languages of the World, and while I have enjoyed it so far, I came across Ethnologue today while searching for information about the Indian language Maithili. Ethnologue seems to be more comprehensive and has cool things like language maps. I want!

It is expensive ($100). The reviews seem to be really good. I am a poor grad student. But this is a book I’d love to own, and an ebook will just not do. Hmm, maybe a New Year present to myself.

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Pittsburghese

From the International Linguistics Olympiad webpage (which started here yesterday)

  • The unique 2nd person plural pronoun “yinz”
  • The “au” sound being pronouned as “ah”, so that “house” comes out as “haas” and “Downtown” as “Dahntahn”.
  • “Full” and “fool” being pronounced the same, as well as “pull” and “pool”.
  • “Needs”, “wants”, and “could use” combining with a participle rather than a gerund, as in “The car needs washed” or “There’s work that needs done”. (Pittsburghers think the gerund in “The car needs washing” or “Work needs doing” sounds very strange.)
  • Positive anymore: “Food is so expensive anymore!”

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Long overdue update

I am still alive!

Going to India in 10 days, very excited :-) I have missed home way way too much.

This year has been good and bad. I haven’t done as well as I would have liked to, but there have been positives and I have learned a lot.

Something funny – the very first NLP related talk I ever attended was a tutorial on XLE (a grammar development platform) in Hyderabad at the ICON 2007 conference. Now, I’m doing a course project using XLE, to write a Hindi grammar :-)

I plan to get some serious research done over the summer once I get back from my trip, and will hopefully update this blog more often.

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Update, and my ancestors :)

It’s been a *tough* semester but I have learnt a lot. I think I am prepared to handle things much better next semester onwards.

I plan to take Language and Statistics and Speech 2: Phonetics, Prosody, Perception and Synthesis. Looking forward to both courses.

Meanwhile, I was Googling around and found something interesting :-)

The AI Genealogy Project

I am advised by

Jack Mostow, PhD, CMU, 1981 – Mechanical Transformation of Task Heuristics into Operational Procedures

Advised by Jaime Carbonell, PhD, Yale, 1979 – Subjective Understanding: Computer Models of Belief Systems

Advised by Roger Carl Schank, PhD, U. Texas Austin, 1969 – A Conceptual-Dependency Representation for a Computer-Oriented Semantics

Advised by Jacob Mey, PhD, 1960, Københavns Universitet, Denmark

Advised by Louis Hjelmslev, MA, 1923 (big gap here!), Københavns Universitet

Advised by Holger Pedersen, PhD, 1897, Københavns Universitet – Aspiration in Irish

And Wikipedia on Holger Pedersen says

Holger Pedersen was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages.

Really nice to know :-)

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So in a class project we have managed to (unintentionally) build a TTS system that sounds exactly like an evil witch/old lady. If anyone wants a voice for a fairy tale, let me know.

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Project Olympus Show and Tell

Project Olympus aims at creating an ecosystem for innovation and turning research into commercial products that people can actually use. Today, they had the annual Show and Tell, with talks by Olympus director Prof. Lenore Blum (aptly titled “Moving beyond proof of concept”), Prof. Jeannette Wing, Prof. Luis von Ahn (first time I heard him speak, fantastic!) and some other CMU professors and a couple of new graduates who are/were participants in Olympus PROBEs (PROBlem-oriented Explorations).

This is something that interests me a lot (bridging the gap between research and technology) and I hope to see a lot more spin-offs from CMU over the next few years that I’m here. I also hope to see something that doesn’t involve crowd-sourcing or social networking (though I know that is in fashion these days :) )

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GasTeX

I had been postponing learning LaTeX all these years for some strange reason. I can’t imagine why now, and I don’t know how I survived without it! I finally decided to dive into it for a homework assignment for my Algorithms in NLP class – full of proofs full of symbols :-) There were some FSA diagrams to be drawn too, and I didn’t feel like drawing things by hand, so I used the GasTeX package. I really enjoyed using it, it was easy to use and churned out very elegant looking figures.

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Project LISTEN!

So, I’m very excited to announce that I will be working on Project LISTEN, a reading tutor for kids that helps them learn how to read by ‘listening’ to them read aloud (speech recognition). My advisor is Prof. Jack Mostow.

More posts soon! :-)

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