Xiaojuan Ma will present her research seminar/general exam on Wednesday May 9 at 10 AM in Room 301 (note room!). The members of her committee are Fei-Fei Li, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Tom Funkhouser. Her advisor is Perry Cook. Everyone is invited to attend her talk, and those faculty members wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Her abstract and reading list follow below. -------------------------------------------- Abstract: Assistive devices and tools for persons with aphasia, a debilitating condition that robs an individual of the ability to communicate, have traditionally depended on icons to convey the meaning of words that the individuals have lost. Despite the predominant use of icons, which are created by artists, speech language pathologists suggest that personal digital photographs may be easier for people to map to the real phenomena. Also, compared to other visual art resources such as icons, images are cheaper, ubiquitous, numerous, and varied. A concept of picture-as-language, which uses digital photographs as a language has shown some significant and long-lasting effects on the learning for people with mental retardation, developmental disabilities, or learning disabilities. Designing for a population that relies heavily on picture representations, it is important to understand to what extent the choice of icons and images affects the adoption and usability of assistive technology. A study with unimpaired members of an older demographic likely to be affected by aphasia shows that, for sentences with words replaced by either images or icons, the word-level and sentence-level meaning are retained equally well for both images and icons. It is also supported by a further study with our target group, people with aphasia, on the effectiveness of icons and images on conveying noun concepts. However, compared to concrete nouns, both studies showed that neither icons or images performed as well on abstract nouns. What's more, the study with senior citizens revealed that both icons and images did a poor job of embodying verbs and attributes. A third study evaluating the efficacy of four different visual representations of verbs for subjects from the general population addressed the question of the best representation of both motion and abstract verbs. Related video and image database for verb illustrations is under construction. Books: Preece, J., Rogers, Y., and Sharp, H. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002. Shneiderman, B. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. Boston: Addison Wesley, 1997. Chapters: 1-4, 10, 11 Papers: Newell A.F., Carmichael, A., Gregor, P., and Alm, N. Information Technology for Cognitive Support. The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, Jacko, J. and Sears, A. (Editors). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 2002. 464-481. R. D. Steele, M. Weinrich, R. T. Wertz, M. K. Kleczewska, and G. S. Carlson. Computer-Based Visual Communication in Aphasia. Neuropsychologia, 27(4):409-426, 1989. van de Sandt-Koenderman, M. W. M. E. High-tech AAC and aphasia: widening horizons? Aphasiology (2004), 18 (3), 245-263. Baecker, R., Small, I., and Mander, R. Bringing Icons to Life. Proceedings of CHI '91 Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 1991, pp. 1-6. J. L. Boyd-Graber, S. S. Nikolova, K. A. Moffatt, K. C. Kin, J. Y. Lee, L.W. Mackey, M. M. Tremaine, and M. M. Klawe. Participatory design with proxies: Developing a desktop-PDA system to support people with aphasia. In Proc. CHI2006, pages 151-160. ACM Press, 2006. K. Tee, K. Moffatt, L. Findlater, E. MacGregor, J. Mc-Grenere, B. Purves, and S. S. Fels. A visual recipe book for persons with language impairments. In Proc. CHI 2005, pages 501-510. ACM Press, 2005. Danielsson, H. and Svensk. A. Digital Pictures as Cognitive Assistance. In Proceedings of the 6th European Conference for the Advancement of Assitive Technology, 2001. (5 pages) R. Mihalcea and B. Leong. Toward communicating simple sentences using pictoral representations. In Proc. of the Conf. of the Assoc. for Machine Translation in the Americas 2006, Boston, MA, 2006. T. Takasaki. Pictnet: Semantic infrastructure for pictogram communication. In P. Sojka, K.-S. Choi, C. Fellbaum, and P. Vossen, editors, Proc. Global WordNet Conference 2006, pages 276-289. GlobalWordNet Association, January 2006. Pettersson, Rune. Interpretation of Image Content. Educational Communication and Technology Journal, v36 n1 p45-55 Spr 1988.