PhD Student Department of Computer Science University of Arizona
Gould-Simpson Building 1040 E. 4th Street Tucson, AZ 85721
rtorres at cs dot arizona dot edu
This is my 5th year as a PhD student. My advisor is Prof. Ian Fasel
My work has been focused on gesture and user recognition (on Multitouch devices), time-sequence analysis and Human-Robot Interaction. I am part of the University of Arizona MindsEye team, working on human-behavior recognition and social-interaction detection and description. I am interested in Human-Computer/Robot Interaction and everything that has to do with human behavior modeling.
I have worked in the next projects and experiments during the my PhD in collaboration with other students and Professors:
User recognition on multitouch devices. Multi-touch tablets allow users to interact with computers through natural gestures over a surface with the fingers, allowing them to manipulate digital objects directly by touch. One advantage of these devices is that they offer a collaborative space where several users can work on a task at the same time, for example in a meeting room or emergency strategy center. In the multi-user case, it can be useful to be able to recognize individuals at interaction time. In this project, we achieve user recognition and authentication for touch devices, based on shape of gesture and velocity. The samples were collected under real-world conditions in a mining business office, using a conventional multi-touch tablet, with no high-precision devices.
Charlie the Robot In this human-Robot interaction experiment, the participants were asked to teach Charlie, a pirate robot, how to find a threasure using text and free speech. Teachers were told they were interacting directly with the robot, ignoring there was a person manipulating it behind the scene, following a Wizard of Oz (WOZ) paradigm. The goal was to understand how humans teach the robot and what do they expect from the robot during the session.
The UAV Experiment In this exploratory WOZ experiment, participants were asked to teach a simple task to a Unmanned Aereal Vehicle (UAV) using different modes of interaction (procedures, teaching by example, feedback and testing) using an interface to construct commands through a menu. This experiment revealed the preferences of teachers when using different methods while teaching the virtual student. An important contribution was the discover of three different types of teachers and the constant use of explicit teaching.
MindsEye The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has contracted with 12 research teams to develop fundamental machine-based visual intelligence and three teams to develop system integration concepts. “Ground surveillance is a mission normally performed by human assets, including Army scouts and Marine Corps Force Recon,” DARPA said. “Military leaders would like to shift this mission to unmanned systems, removing troops from harm’s way, but unmanned systems lack a capability that currently exists only in humans: visual intelligence. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is addressing this problem with Mind’s Eye, a program aimed at developing a visual intelligence capability for unmanned systems. From:Kurzweil
Challenges to Decoding the Intention Behind Natural Instruction. Raquel Torres Peralta, Tasneem Kaochar, Clayton T. Morrison, Thomas J. Walsh, Ian R. Fasel and Paul R. Cohen. 20th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Ro-Man 2011).
Challenges to Decoding the Intention Behind Natural Instruction (Extended abstract). Raquel Torres Peralta, Tasneem Kaochar, Clayton T. Morrison, Thomas J. Walsh, Ian R. Fasel and Paul R. Cohen. Raquel Torres Peralta, Tasneem Kaochar, Clayton T. Morrison, Ian R. Fasel, Thomas J. Walsh, Paul R. Cohen. IJCAI 2011 Workshop on Agents Learning Interactively from Human Teachers (ALIHT).Best presentation award
Human Natural Instruction of a Simulated Electronic Student. Tasneem Kaochar, Raquel Torres Peralta, Clayton T. Morrison, Thomas J. Walsh, Ian R. Fasel, Sumin Beyon, Anh Tran, Jeremy Wright and Paul R. Cohen. AAAI Spring Symposium: Help Me Help You (2011).
Towards An Understanding of How Humans Teach Robots. Tasneem Kaochar, Raquel Torres Peralta, Clayton T. Morrison, Ian R. Fasel, Thomas J. Walsh, Paul R. Cohen. User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2011).
Teaching Robots. Raquel Torres Peralta, Presentation at the Seminar of Computer Science, Cal Poly Pomona.
