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.”
