Month: May 2018

We had the great opportunity to present our work at the Penn State Hershey Childre’s Hospital Pediatric Research Day, Hershey, PA, May 24, 2018. There Dr. Conrad Tucker presented a lecture on “Advancing Personalized Healthcare through Big Data and Machine Learning.” In this lecture, he exhibited some of my research on using Machine learning and genomics to advance personalized medicine.

In addition, we presented our research titled “Towards Personalized Gamification to Promote Physical Activity.” In this work, we proposed a method that implements Machine Learning and non-wearable sensors to personalized Gamified applications with the objective to promote physical activity.

On April 17th, 2018, we were fortunate to be part of the first Distinguished Lecture on Engineering and Humanity from the Collge of Engineering at PSU. In this event, Dr. Claude Steele presented his work on “Stereotype Threat and Identity Threat: The Science of a Diverse Community.” I also had the privilege to represent the Multicultural Engineering Graduate Association (MEGA) on a student discussion with Dr. Steele held later on that same day. In this private meeting with students, Dr. Steele emphasized the importance of acknowledging diversity and working to foster trust in the community.

Once again, I had the opportunity to attend to one of the greatest innovation and creativity festivals from my alma mater: Imagine RIT. This was the11th year anniversary and my 7th year attending!!. It was so great to visit the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and my old  Industrial and Systems Engineering Department.

Image RIT is a great opportunity to see at first-hand the latest research and technology that are shaping the future, as well as to try some nitrogen ice cream 😛  (here are some pictures of the festival, look at PSU and RIT next to each other 😛 )

We are getting ready for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) & Computers & Information in Engineering (CIE) Conference. This will take place in Quebec City, Canada from August 26-29, 2018. We will be presenting our work titled: “Human Validation of Computer vs. Human Generated Design Sketches,” (PDF) done in collaboration with Dr. Conrad Tucker and Dr. Scarlet Miller.

In this work explored the perceived visual and functional characteristics of computer generated design sketches and the biases humans have towards computer and human generated sketches. The results of this work indicated that computer generated sketches were perceived as more functional than the human generated ones. In addition, the results revealed that participants had a negative bias towards human generated sketches. However, they were not able to accurately distinguish between computer and human generated sketches. This work provided evidence that supports the capabilities of deep generative design tools and their potential to assist designers in creative tasks.