STEM Spotlight: Technology With Human Sensibilities

Imagine receiving a text message that you don’t use your hands or eyes to intercept. The obvious solution is to use your ears. While  scientists have created phones that read text messages aloud, most of those concepts don’t take human behavior into account. If a text message is made audible using a computer software but is written using shorthand–e.g., LOL (laugh out loud) and SMH (shaking my head)–then the receiver will most likely pick up the phone to read the message if it wasn’t translated correctly.  That defeats the purpose of making the message hands-free.

Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D., chair of the human centered computing division at Clemson University, along with his team of doctoral and post doctoral students invented “Voicing”, a way to send and receive short messages in a way that keeps the hands and eyes free, and gives the recipient more control as to what form they receive their messages. Students at Clemson University will be giving the voicing interface a test run this November to see if the software actually keeps them from being distracted by their phones while driving.

Human Centered Computing is what Gilbert and his students call the process they used to create voiceing. Although HCC is a new discipline with Ph.D. programs in only two schools (University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Georgia Tech), it was first recognized and legitimized by the National Science Foundation. Plus other schools like Clemson are hoping to receive certification for HCC programs at their schools. Black Enterprise spoke with Gilbert about HCC, the research he’s done, and the career opportunities available for people with experience in this area.

Black Enterprise: What is human centered computing?
Juan Gilbert: We design, build, and evaluate real world problems that integrate people, technology, information, policy, and culture. We have the ability to design something (typically software solutions, but not limited or restricted to software), implement it, then test and evaluate it.

Why is the HCC approach important?
It is important because it takes an interdisciplinary approach to solve the issues that we have. We understand people and we know how to design solutions that enable people or benefit people, or improve upon the task that they are trying to do.

Give me an example of how your research is used in the real world?
Prime 3 is an electronic voting system we wrote. It allows you to vote using touch and/or voice. People who can’t hear, see, or read, and people without arms can all privately and independently vote on the same machine as anyone else. It is a touch screen, and it has a headset or a microphone if you don’t have arms. It will say to you “To vote for candidate A, say ‘vote’ or blow into the microphone to make a selection.”  If I were ease dropping on that person, all I would hear them say was ‘vote,’ or I would hear them blow into a microphone. You have no way of knowing who they are voting for. That is a software design but we are also implementing a hardware design of what the physical manifestation of the machine should be.

How is this different from what other scientists and inventors do?
The idea behind the design of the voting machine is that we deal with people first. If you look at most disciplines they train in silos. They learn your discipline [only]. Computer science majors are taught how to build software and implement it, but computer science majors are not taught to design software that is more usable for people in a particular context. That is the big difference. We’ve seen, time and time again, where people build applications and software that is not very user-friendly or doesn’t satisfy a particular population. HCC is extremely interdisciplinary. You have to know people, technology, research, and experimentation. It integrates these things in a way that is unique. Typically you would need to hire three people to do what our graduates are being trained to do.

What types of careers are available for someone with an HCC degree?

You can be an academic or work in a research lab in the government or for a company. If you are a professor, you will teach a class, write grants, and do the same things that most professors do. But what is different from other professors is that your software and [inventions] will transfer into the real world. So you will have other obligations with respect to your inventions. You will probably meet with people from arts and science, philosophy, psychology, and engineering; so you are working with a broader scope of individuals on varied applied problems.

Are there jobs for HCC people in corporate America?
If you work in industry, then most likely, you are working on research and patents. HCC graduates can work anyplace that designs and builds things and wants to test them with people. There are implications for all kinds of industries–health, automotive, software, computer, internet, communications. You will either be the project lead and have a team that you are directing or you’ll be part of a team and receive the pieces of the puzzle. The one career that most people don’t think of is policy or  government. If you look at how technology impacts policy, you need competent people in the legislative process. Take for example the voting machine. Of course, there will be someone who designs it physically,

someone to design the ergonomics of the machine, someone who designs the software and writes the code, but there needs to be a person [who knows the law]. They would say, according to our policy on voting, you have to have a ballot that looks this way and does this. HCC students are trained across all of those things so we get more bang for the buck. We can build graduates who are competent not only in the technology but also in the policy.

How would a college graduate know if this was an area they might like to pursue?
Our preliminary research has shown that women and minorities tend to work on applied or social disciplines. There are a large number of African Americans in education, for example, but not in science and STEM. Why is that? Minorities are often raised in an environment where we are told not to forget where we come from or who you are and to always help someone else. We tend to be attracted to social science careers because they are seen as helping professions. STEM professions are seen as disciplines used to work with phenomenon and artifacts. It is not seen as something that helps people. HCC unites the two. We are working on phenomenon and helping people.