Research Synopsis
Research Philosophy
Albert Einstein once said, "The most important thing is to not stop questioning". I believe as a researcher and a future scientist, I have a right and duty to question even the most fundamental cornerstones of present confounds of science. I believe science knows no boundaries. There is no single discipline of science and knowledge emerges from interdisciplinary interactions and research. The desire to question and gather knowledge base from various disciplines defines my research approach.
My primary areas of interest are multimedia systems, multimodal human computer interfaces and cognitive modeling of multimodal processing in the brain. Work done in the past few decades on multimedia systems has grown manifolds. While commercial systems have focused primarily on encoding, storage and presentation of multimedia data, extensive research has been conducted on automatic extraction of information from multimedia data. However most of the research has focused on information extraction from a single stream such as audio or video. Dr Ramesh Jain from Georgia Institute of Technology, in his media vision article in the IEEE Multimedia magazine once asked why is it that airlines companies charge $5 for a pair of headsets to enjoy the inflight entertainment. He cited the fact that information presentation and for that matter information processing is incomplete if it does'nt incorporate algorithms for truly multimodal processing. This powerful statement has strong foundations in biological basis of human consciousness and information processing. Humans work in multimodal environments. They hear, smell, feel and see a stimulus. There are parts of the brain (Parietal Cortex) dedicated to multimodal processing and deriving correlations both positive and negative between various streams of data perceived by humans. Present day computers clearly lack this ability. It is my aim to further the goal of developing truly multimodal systems.
The desire for natural, intuitive means of human-machine interaction and for multi-modal sensory feedback has resulted in the design of machines which allow users to generate control inputs using hand motion. At the same time users experience forces or resistance on their hands which create realistic perceptions. These machines are called haptic interfaces, where haptics refers to the science of touch. While initial research has been promising, there are considerable research challenges to development of natural haptic interfaces. One of the major problems is that the human tactile system is not as well understood as other modalities such as vision, speech or motor systems. The study of human tactile abilities is a recent endeavor and many of the available systems still do not incorporate the domain knowledge of psychophysics, biomechanics and neurological elements of haptic perception. Development of smart and effective haptic interfaces and devices requires extensive studies that link perceptual phenomena with biological measures and incorporation of such domain knowledge in the engineering of haptic interfaces. These devices present an exciting opportunity to use haptics to develop assistive and rehabilitative devices. Haptics offers an intriguing opportunity to develop a communication channel with individuals who are blind. It also allows us to build rehabilitative systems that engage patients with neurological disorders in multimodal virtual environments immersing the brain in multimodal tasks that include touch-based neural circuits. These tasks could be designed to cognitively engage the patient's specific areas of the brain and aid in rehabilitation. In order to test my theories and systems for haptic user interfaces and their usability, I have designed assistive and rehabilitative devices that involve haptics.
The following are the links to my present work
. Visio-Haptic Analysis and Processing
. Multimodal Attentional Modeling
ASU Main Website