We had a great time, during the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Industry Open House (April 25th, 2018). We had the privilege to present our research on personalized learning systems that take advantage of machine learning and facial expression recognition algorithms. The event was a great opportunity to discuss with industry partners how machine learning and facial recognition technologies can help solve a variety of engineering problems and improve the productivity of a wide range of industrial and service processes.
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Once again we participated in the College of Engineering Research Symposium, which took place April 10th, 2018 in the Nittany Lion Inn at Penn State. This time we won second place, which included a $200 prize, with our research “The quest towards personalized gamification: Exploring the effects of individuals’ player type on performance” (see presentation). We also presented our research on “Personalized Performance Feedback: Mining Facial Keypoint Data in Engineering Lab Environments” and as always the audience enjoyed the demo of real-time facial keypoint data capture (see presentation). Here are few pictures of the event.
I was excited to attend this great festival. The 2018 USA Science & Engineering Festival was the most exciting, educational, and entertaining STEM festival in the US. The festival took place in Washinton D.C., from April 7-8th. There were so many exciting technologies to see, but it was most rewarding to see the passion of so many kids and young adults for the STEM fields. Big companies, universities, and federal agencies were present (e.g., Lockheed Martin, RIT, PSU, NSF, NIH, and more). Here are just a few of the pictures I took (for more visit #scifest).
The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Mid-Atlantic Spring 2018 Conference, which took place at the University of the District of Columbia from April 6-7, was a great opportunity to network with peers in the field of Eng. education. In the conference, I served as a co-chair alongside Dr. Rocia Alba-Flores. Moreover, I had the opportunity to present our paper “Towards Personalized Performance Feedback: Mining the Dynamics of Facial Keypoint Data in Engineering Lab Environments“. This work is the continuation of our research on mining students’ facial expression and implementing machine learning models to predict their performance prior to the start of a task. The proposed individual-task machine learning model was validated with data of students collected in an engineering lab environment. The performance of the model shows its potential to advance the field of personalized learning. This paper won the Mid-Atlantic ASEE Best Paper Award (see presentation). Similarly, we presented a poster titled “Exploring Human-Co-Robot Interactions: Real-time Feedback or not?“. In this work, we started exploring the effects that real-time feedback has on student performance, and how it might be counterproductive (under certain circumstances) provide students with real-time feedback of their performance (e.g., negative performance feedback).
I have to thank the Center for Engineering Outreach and Inclusion at Penn State, especially Mrs. Helen Edson and Mrs. Erin Hostetler, for the financial support and help provided that allowed me to attend this conference. Here are just a few pictures of the event.
We took part in the 2018 Institute for CyberSiciene (ICS) symposium: Harnessing the Power of Data at Penn State. This one-day conference, that focused on innovative computational research in the fields of Precision Health, Cybersecurity, and Smart Communities. During this event, we presented, our work on “Personalized gamification to promote physical activity“. There were several interesting panel discussion, especially on the topic of precision and personalized health. Dr.Jame R. Broach, from the Institute of Personalized Medicine, gave a great presentation about using genomics to advance the field of personalized medicine. Here are few pictures.
We were one of the 214 graduate students to present their research at the 2018 Penn State Graduate Exhibition. We presented our work done on facial keypoint data mining to improve personalized feedback, titled: “Towards Personalized Performance Feedback by Mining the Dynamics of Facial Keypoint Data”. People had a great time interacting with the DATA Lab Co-Robot Penny and its facial recognition capabilities. Here are some pictures of the event.
I was able to be part of the 2018 Emerging Research National (ERN) Conference in STEM, celebrated in Washington, D.C. (February 22nd-24th). There were several great speakers, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) presenting how the responses to last year’s storms are offering lessons on resiliency and opportunity in the Caribbean (see article here).
During the ERN conference, we were part of the Graduate Fair and represented the Multicultural Engineering Graduate Association from Penn State. During the conference, we assisted Dr. Gersie from the Applied Research Laboratory and their D.O.O.R Summer program, as well as the Center for Engineering Outreach and Inclusion in the search and recruitment of minorities and underrepresented students that are planning to pursue a graduate education in the STEM fields.
Once again, we were delighted to be part of the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (IME) Department Graduate Open House. There we had the opportunity to meet prospective graduate students and talk about all the great things the IME department, Penn State, and Happy Valley has to offer. Moreover, we won first place in the poster competition!! in which the same prospective students judged existing IME graduate students’ research on their quality of presentation and intellectual contribution to the research community. I hope to see all of them next fall semester, pursuing high-quality research here at Penn State.
On November 9th 2017, I was honored to be part of the NSF National Robotics Initiative PI Meeting celebrated in Arlington, VA. There we presented an updated on the research works funded by the NSF NRI “Real Time Observation, Inference and Intervention of Co-robot Systems Towards Individually Customized Performance Feedback Based on Students’ Affective States“ (# 1527148 )(see PSU news article). Dr. Tucker provided the project progress update during the afternoon long talk section, while I presented some of our finding and our Co-robot Penny during the morning poster section (see presentation).
There were several interesting talks and panels in which world-renowned researchers in Robotics and AI discussed the future of these fields and the impact these technologies will have in our future. Here just a few of pictures of the event and our Penny the Co-robot.
