Andrew H. Fagg: Wearable Computing
and Human-Machine Interaction

There are currently many consumer electronic devices that promise to improve our daily lives by performing a wide range of tasks -- especially related to communication and memory functions. However, in practice, these devices demand greater amounts of personal attention on the part of the user, which detracts from their benefits. A solution is to develop devices capable of automatically making intelligent guesses as to the information that the user will need over the next few minutes. This information should then be presented in a form that minimizes user distraction. By reducing the user's need to attend to the mechanics of interacting with the devices, we open up a wide range possibilities for new uses of such wearable computing systems.

Multi-Modal Wearable Computer Interfaces

I have developed a distributed service model to address these problems. A set of independent agents is responsible for gathering information that may be useful to the user at any given time (e.g., email, news, and location-dependent "sticky" notes). However, these agents do not communicate directly to the user, but instead submit information to a central interaction process. This process is responsible for making context-sensitive decisions about whether the information should be presented to the user and how it should be presented (displayed as text or whispered in the user's ear). I approach this decision problem as one of control in which a representation of the user's activity is translated into an appropriate presentation action. This control perspective of the user interface enables us to engage a variety of machine learning approaches, including both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

To date, this perspective has been applied in two experiments. First, I have shown that an effective association can be acquired between a representation of the user's current activity and a document that she will access in that context. This prediction is acquired by looking over the user's shoulder and observing regular patterns of document access. Predicted documents are presented to the user in menu form and can be selected with a minimal number of keystrokes, increasing the speed at which many documents can be retrieved. Second, a student of mine has examined a context-sensitive power management problem in which a mobile computer must decide at any given time to suspend for a short period of time or continue to be active so as to respond to user requests or critical sensory events. We formulated the problem in terms of an SMDP and employed Q-Learning (a form of reinforcement learning) to optimize the selection of control actions. The learned control policy acquired an implicit representation of the conditions under which the processor could safely suspend while only missing a small number of external events. In the coming semester, we will be applying similar techniques to the problem of when/how to present agent-generated messages.

Human-Robot Interaction Through Virtual and Mixed Reality Interfaces

The issues addressed in the wearable computing domain also apply to the area of human-robot interaction. Here, we wish to maximize the efficiency of communication between the human and (potentially) many robots. Several students and I have been developing mixed-reality interfaces (a combination of real and virtual environments) for this purpose (Fagg et al., 2002; Ou, Karuppiah, Fagg, and Riseman, 2004). Here, a virtual environment is used to summarize the state of the real world as extracted by the set of sensors and to make explicit the physical relationships between the different robots and sensors. This approach allows the user to explore the data space in a spatial manner and then to select individual sensors for access to their live data streams or individual robots for control purposes.

Robot Learning Through Human Interaction

One of the dominant paradigms in robot control for space applications or hazardous environments is for a user to teleoperate a robot. Due to the large cognitive effort required to ensure that the robot acts as intended by the teleoperator, the useful operation time of a user is often less than an hour. I have been exploring the use of mixed autonomy approaches that allow the robot to perform some subtasks autonomously after permission is given by the user. One approach that I have been pursuing is to use our already-existing humanoid control system as a mechanism for the recognition of the intended movement produced by the teleoperator. This technique is being used to preemptively complete movements initiated by the teleoperator (giving the teleoperator short periods of time to rest) and to train the control system to perform sequences of submovements within a single demonstration.

More information


fagg at ou.edu

Last modified: Sun Feb 15 15:38:34 2004