Aloha

End of the road

Wed, 4 Jun 2008 19:21:23 -0700

Thanks to a surprisingly smooth oral defense and very minor revisions requested from my committee, I was able to successfully submit the final draft of my dissertation to the Stanford University Registrar’s office this afternoon. This is the end of the road for my time at Stanford as a student, but I will be around this summer, wrapping up the other six projects at Stanford and PARC that I had to put on hold to get this dissertation done. After five years in this PhD program, I am finally DONE.

All but dissertation

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:25:48 -0800

As of this week, I have finished running my last two dissertation experiments! Thanks to the folks at AuSIM, Sennheiser Research, the VW Electronics Research Lab, and CCRMA at Stanford, I assembled all of the necessary knowledge, skills, and equipment to make this happen one quarter ahead of time. AuSIM’s great 3-D audio simulation software uses information such as the head orientation of the listener, the temperature and humidity of the environment, and much more. I ran two experiments that I don’t want to give away just yet, but I will say that the data analyses are looking very promising. If all goes well, then the 121 hours of participants’ time will not go to waste. Now I’ve just got to focus on my data analysis and writing.

Publications-wise, this has been a good quarter for other ongoing projects. Our human-robot interaction (HRI) paper on robot occupations was accepted for publication as a full paper. My workshop paper on agentic objects was also accepted so I’ll be going to Amsterdam in March for HRI 2008. My CHI sensemaking workshop paper was accepted so I’m trying to see if I can make it out to Florence in April for CHI 2008, too. I still need to do a lot more writing, especially for my journal paper articles that are all in the works.

Now that I no longer have to work in the basement laboratory, attending to experiment participants, I can focus more on reading, writing, and deciding what to do after graduating.

Traveling to Takayama

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:31:26 -0800

Since I was co-presenting out Touch-Talk project at the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI) in Nagoya, I decided to take a day trip to the nearby town of Takayama before leaving Japan. Takayama translates into “tall mountain,” which very properly describes the this mountainous region in Japan. The train ride as beautiful, crossing through the mountains and over the river several times. It was surprisingly easy to travel around on my own. I’ve never thought much of my Japanese language skills, but when I got stuck in a pinch at the train stations, I was suddenly able to understand what people were saying and even articulated full, comprehensive sentences to talk with the workers there.

The ICMI conference was surprisingly relevant for my own research. I had not considered my work to be about multimodal interfaces before, but now I see how the use of multiple sensory modalities is quite relevant to issues of more natural, embodied forms of communication and action. The human-robot interaction projects were very interesting though I still do not fully grasp why Japanese robots are designed to be so kawaii.

So hard to say goodbye

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:58:52 -0700

My trusty old car will soon up for adoption. I never named it; I didn’t have any life-changing experiences in it; I can’t believe how attached I’ve become to it. It’s hard to imagine someone else driving this car that has served as my trusty set of wheels ever since I first got my driver’s license. Just gathering the papers to sell my car makes me feel guilty. I’m driving a much better hand-me-down car now and can’t afford to maintain two cars so this one has just got to go. That reasoning is totally clear to me, but somehow I know that this great, quirky, little car is going to be extremely difficult to let go.