Research

Research Groups > Human-Computer Interaction

Timothy Bickmore
Timothy
Bickmore		 Harriet Fell
Harriet
Fell		 Carole Hafner
Carole
Hafner		 Marty Vona
Marty
Vona


Stephen Intille

 Magy Seif El NasrMagy Seif
El-Nasr

Northeastern's human-computer interaction (HCI) group examines new ways of working with computers. From interactive agents and sensor-enabled mobile technoogies to help people manage their health to devices that monitor whether a driver is paying attention to the road, the group develops tools that improve quality of life.

The group’s primary research areas include artificial intelligence; speech and natural language processing with a focus on health informatics; computational sensing for health technologies; simulation and conversational agents; and speech channels as input to computers.

Team Achievements

  • Developed medical ontologies to enable researchers to more effectively search medical databases to find information relevant to their needs;
  • Created software to analyze infants' babble and provide diagnostic information on whether a child may be at risk for speech-related problems;
  • Created an animated virtual nurse that educates hospital patients about their health conditions and post-discharge self-care, encourages people to exercise and take medications as prescribed, and simulates face-to-face conversations between patients and healthcare professionals; 
  • Investigated the use of mobile phone techonology to monitor the physical activity of children and adults and motivate them to change their behavior to promote long term weight management;
  • Applied human attention models to the design of mobile and ubiquitous computing systems to design safer interfaces for environments in which multiple tasks must be attended to (such as driving a car while using an electronic navigation system);
  • Developed methods for enabling 3-D object recognition with learning.
  • Assisted NASA with challenges related to the human operation of complex robots
  • Created hardware and software sensing systems for home environments that automatically detect health-related behaviors and respond with tailored, just-in-time feedback to create persuasive computing technologies.