Dr. Tracy Hammond, the director of the Sketch Recognition Lab, attended and presented at IUI. Furthermore, SRL would also like to extend congratulations to Seth Polsley and Trevor Nelligan for winning Best Poster at the conference!
The annual meeting of the community, as described by IUI’s website, “serves as a premier international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces.”
It is where the Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence communities meet. However, IUI is always interested in related fields of study such as cognitive science, design, arts, psychology, and everything in between.
In her presentation at the conference, Dr. Hammond discussed multiple computer science and engineering concepts.
(Dr. Hammond during her presentation)
Between Dr. Hammond presenting and discussing the possibility of co-hosting IUI 2019 in Texas, the trio had discussions with future and past conference organizers John Donavan, Henry Lieberman, Yolanda Gil, Michell Zhou, and others. Even with schedules so jam-packed, the SRL team found time to relax and talk about leisure topics while at IUI.
Of course, they found ways to poke fun at one another, as always.
“Well, your shoes aren't completely apocalyptic,” Nelligan, the SRL's resident fashion guru, summarized to Polsley as they left the airport with Dr. Hammond. “Your hoodie could be less baggy.”
The jokes and fun also overflowed into Polsley and Nelligan’s interview about their IUI experience.
While at the conference, they presented a winning poster on Mechanix as a team.
“Yes,” Polsley answered instantly when asked if they presented as a duo. “He sang bass and I sang the rest.”
“There is a full sextet that is the entire authorship of the paper, but they weren’t all there,” Nelligan added.
The remaining authors of the paper, to whom Polsley and Nelligan expressed their gratitude toward, were Jaideep Ray, Dr. Michael Helms, Dr. Julie Linsey, and Dr. Tracy Hammond.
“It was actually nice presenting as a pair,” Polsley added on. “Because we could move away and see some other posters.”
“And if one of us got in trouble the other person could help out,” Nelligan expanded.
(Trevor Nelligan [left] and Seth Polsley [right] the day before the conference)
The judges and spectators that visited the poster and discussed Mechanix with Nelligan and Polsley were impressed with the program and the research presented.
Mechanix is a sketch-based tutoring system for engineering students about subjects that involve a lot of hand-written work. Just as students would with pen and paper, Mechanix has practice problems and instructor-inserted assessments for users to draw in by using a tablet.
The program uses sketch recognition to understand the relationship between geometric shapes and force indicators input by the user. It can then evaluate whether a student’s work is correct and, if not, where the student made a mistake. This allows Mechanix to give personalized feedback to the student about their work – something that is near impossible for an instructor to do for every single student in a large class. More about Mechanix can be found here at the SRL website.
“IUI was fantastic – we met a lot of really smart people there,” Nelligan began before talking about one particular dinner setting as an example of networking at the conference. “It was really cool, eating at this super fancy restaurant with a table full of field leading researchers, geniuses, and really cool people in general. It was like out of a movie.”
“The thing that I learned from IUI is that graduates and undergraduates should publish as much as possible,” Polsley continued. “It was such a huge opportunity. We got to meet so many top people. It was a very, very valuable experience.”
Nelligan and Polsley went on to agree that while winning best poster presentation was validating to their work and exploring Atlanta was a fun experience, the biggest takeaway they had from IUI was getting to know and connecting to experts and leaders in their field of work and seeing what other innovations are happening.
“Dr. Hammond is an incredibly supportive advisor,” Polsley complimented as Nelligan nodded his agreement. “Dr. Hammond wants students to show their work and go to conferences. If you have a presentation at a conference, she will get you there.”
