Monday, April 18, 2016

SRL at Aggieland Saturday

On February 13th, the Sketch Recognition Lab volunteered to participate in Aggieland Saturday. This event is a campus-wide open-house for visitors, primarily high school students and their families, to come and see the happenings in various departments across the university. Members of SRL, directed by Dr. Tracy Hammond, signed up to fill presentation and lab tour slots to demonstrate a few projects and to talk to the students and families who came to visit.

The main Texas A&M University campus was bustling with visitors, tour guides, volunteers, and various organizations and businesses from around town. Some of the students that came to the SRL presentation were from across the state, having made the drive to come to the event and to explore what TAMU had to offer.

Over the span of the day, SRL gave four demonstrations for visitors who were welcomed to Aggieland and the lab. Seth Polsley lead the presentation of projects.

(Left to Right: Cassandara Oduola, Seth Polsley, and Pernendu Kaul presenting to visitors)

In their last presenation of the day, SRL members Cassandara Oduola, Seth Polsley, and Pernendu Kaul ran demonstrations of eye tracking technology, Mechanix, and Persketchitivity.

Polsley, in his welcome speech, gave a brief introduction of a few projects to demonstrate the vast areas of interest that are covered in the lab - from KidGab, a social media for children to learn about Internet safety, all the way to SmartStrokes, a digitalized version of neuropsychology tests in the medical field.

"All kinds of things go on in our lab. We have lots of grad students and lots and lots of undergrad students," he continued. "So I'm so happy that you guys are here and get to see what's going on in the lab."

With the greeting and quick summary of the lab complete, the volunteers moved on to demonstrations of a few projects they set up for the visitors to interact with.

Kaul kicked this portion of the presentation with an eye tracking system. While it was not hooked up to a program to use it with, a visitor was able to calibrate the system and see as the screen reacted - a series of eight circles with plus signs inside of them were arranged around the perimeter of the screen, a ninth circle was in the middle of the screen. After calibration, the circle a user stares at will light up red.

"Is it going to hurt?" The visitor questioned when he sat in front of the mechanism. Kaul quickly assured him that it wouldn't and not to worry.

"We would need you to sign a waiver if it did," Oduola joked, easing the tension of the question.

"When the documents come out, that's when you want to hesitate," Polsley teased further before continuing more seriously. "Eye tracking is actually very interesting because it's very non-invasive and it's becoming available for the desktop. We don't actually have any of the projects that use eye tracking set up today, because most of the people who use it aren't here, but you can see the system."

(Kaul and a volunteer demonstrating the eye tracking technology)

The visiting high school students eagerly watched as the system worked, highlighting each dot that was being traced in various patterns.

The demonstration moved onward and onto the large Microsoft Surface. Polsley opened Mechanix on the large touchscreen, describing that the program was made for teaching civil engineering students how to solve truss and free diagram problems.

"It's primarily to help educators in large classes automatically have some evaluation metric for their students," he explained. "And then for the students to get feedback as they go through these problems."

He took a few minutes to explain the interface and invite the visitors to interact with the large touchscreen by sketching and solving the tutorial problems presented by Mechanix.

As they continued to explain the program, Polsley took the visitors step by step through a full, but simple, practice problem. For each part, he asked for someone to draw and test the program as he described what was happening in the system to create the feedback and the images that appeared on the screen.

“This is a collaborative way of solving a problem,” he joked as he watched someone draw a force direction pointing to a node in a truss. “This system is built with multiple layers. There is the sketch recognition aspect and error recognizers, but we also have a linear algebra solver that can understand these equations, so that, as students are going through the homework, we can evaluate if they’re solving every part of the problem correctly. So this is quite an expansive system.”

After concluding their segment on Mechanix, the SRL volunteers moved on to demonstrating a similar program, Persketchativity, a program that is designed to help people learn drawing. It is particularly useful for people doing graphic design or art courses in which students need to learn to draw perspective. As with Mechanix, Persketchativity starts users off slowly with practices regarding drawing lines and simple geometric shapes. Eventually, its lessons get more and more complex until they involve drawing perspective and more advanced shapes.


(SRL Members Seth Polsley and Cassandara Oduola demonstrating Persketchativity)

Unique to Persketchativity is the error analysis, which shows a graphical image of how far off mark a drawing is by connecting the input sketch with the correct lines. 

Polsley quickly took the visitors through the first lesson on lines so that he could demonstrate the analytics of the program. “So at the end it’s going to give me some metrics on my speed, my smoothness, my error analysis, and things like that. Anything a professor might be interested in.” He opened another lesson as he continued. “So you can see how this would be a helpful tool for students and the metrics at the end make it nice for the professor to use.”

After the demonstration concluded, the SRL volunteers stressed that, while education was a large area that held opportunities for the lab, the projects created and research studied spanned a wide variety of fields. They touched on, for example, how there was also a focus on health research in the lab, because there are a vast number of ways to use the recognition systems used in education to help in medical fields.

“We have a lot of projects,” Polsley commented as his fellow lab members agreed with nods. “It’s a big lab. We’ve made navigation systems using haptic, which is just touch-vibration. We have a vest that was developed for the military to help troopers find rendezvous points and a group that is working on a similar system to help the visually impaired navigate based on touch.”

After the SRL members concluded their speech, they opened the floor to questions and interactions with the visiting students and their parents. Many of the students expressed enthusiasm for what they were shown and finding ways to be involved with the lab, regardless of whether or not they were interested in computer science or other branches of technology or engineering.

“This is a huge research institution,” Polsley offered as both a final statement and an invitation for future interaction with the lab. “It’s a massive university, and has a lot of potential for anything that interests you, so it’s all pretty exciting.”

Thursday, April 14, 2016

SRL wins 5 awards at the 2015 Spring IAP Poster Competition and CSE Banquet

On April 20th, 2015, the Sketch Recognition Lab, directed by Dr. Tracy Hammond, kicked off a busy, bustling afternoon that included both the IAP Poster Competition and, soon after, the Computer Science and Engineering Departmental Banquet and Awards Ceremony. 

Seven members of SRL, six graduates and one undergraduate presented posters at the IAP Competition. Many of the judges later commented on how impressed they were with the work and presentations of the SRL members.


The hard work that everyone put into their presentations was reflected at the awards ceremony later that evening, with Seth Polsley winning second place and Stephanie Valentine tying for first place in the IAP poster competition!

Additionally, Trevor Nelligan won the Undergraduate Research Award, Stephanie Valentine won the Mentorship Excellence Award, and Rafael (Rafa) Moreno won the Undergraduate Leadership Award at the CSE banquet! Congratulations to everyone!! 


Rafa Moreno, who recently joined SRL as an undergraduate researcher working on Smart Strokes with Raniero Lara Garduno, stated, "It feels pretty good to win the award, not for the award itself, but the fact that someone agrees with you on the impact of what you are doing, and how many people it is positively affecting."

Outside of the lab, Moreno is interested in machine learning and computer vision as it relates to artificial intelligence. He is also the president of TAMUHack and helps the organization and growth of the "hackathon".

SRL MS Student Seth Polsley, one of six graduate students who presented in the poster competition, won second place for his research with Mechanix.


Polsley's poster focused on the trends regarding student interaction with the problems given to them in Mechanix. For example, how many times have students tried to correctly answer specific problems? At what point in an assignment did a concept throw students off and caused them to struggle?

Everyone has experienced the stress and frustration that occurs when a problem can’t be solved immediately or even after a few tries. The more frustration that builds up, the harder and more irritating the problem becomes. However, sometimes the best solution is to let it go. Relax. Coming back to a problem an hour or a day later can sometimes make it easier to think logically and solve it. 

“Sometimes you need a break,” Polsley stated about struggling with a question. “Maybe we can add something in Mechanix that pops up after a certain number of attempts on a question. It may just be something like ‘go ahead and continue and come back later.’” 

Like Polsley, Nelligan's research and studies have focused on Mechanix this semester. Trevor Nelligan won the Undergraduate Research Excellence Award for his presentation for the IAP competition.


Mechanix is an innovative and digital learning area for beginners. The program itself allows for instructors to create practice problems for students. Users can then sketch images into the program and add force and force direction to solve the problems and produce formulas.

Once a problem is worked out by a student, they can submit it for instant feedback and correction. This is particularly helpful in a large class where handwritten assignments are necessary – for example, an engineering or mathematics class. While it would take time for an instructor to grade and comment on every student’s assignment, Mechanix allows for students to be automatically evaluated and given feedback to help students understand what was missed in the problem.

SRL PhD Candidate Stephanie Valentine also presented at the IAP Competition and won first place for her research covering her work with KidGab. Valentine’s colorful poster resembled a screenshot of a social media site with the flair of her own touch. 

Along with her poster, Valentine set up a tablet in her presentation that constantly showed a looped video about how sketches on KidGab can become videos of the drawing being created, pen stroke by pen stroke. While this is currently a fun, leisure application found in KidGab, it can be used in an educational setting to make videos about concepts learned in class – for example, a sketch about how to solve a problem using long division.

In her presentation, Valentine gave a brief rundown on her social network for kids aged 7 to 12. Her goal of educating children on how to be safe online and have a responsible digital self were a driving force behind her speech. She also touched on how KidGab is used by children that she has worked with during Digital Friendship workshops to identify and express themselves.
  
Congratulations to everyone who participated and to everyone who was awarded for their posters and involvement with the CSE Department!

With the stress of research competitions out of the way for the moment, SRL attended the end of the year banquet for the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Texas A&M University. The senior capstone groups – who have mentors in the SRL – had posters on display for the first half of the night.

With a beautiful layout and delicious food, the evening was a nice breather to the hectic schedule that members of the SRL usually face. In fact, it became an event for everyone to have fun, chat, and shake the stress off on the dance floor – perhaps while learning a few new steps along the way.