Describing routes is an easy everyday task for people who know the environment well. However, strategies exist also for situations where only incomplete knowledge is available. We present a study eliciting verbalized route plans and thinkaloud data from novices and experts who were asked to find and describe routes in a complex building. The spatial descriptions were analyzed relating the level...

In conversation, speakers become more like each other in various dimensions. This phenomenon, commonly called entrainment, coordination, or alignment, is widely believed to be crucial to the success and naturalness of human interactions. We investigate entrainment in four acoustic and prosodic dimensions. We explore whether speakers coordinate with each other in these dimensions over the conver...

In this paper we report on our work on a prototype route navigation dialogue system for use in a vehicle. The system delivers spoken turn-by-turn directions, and has been developed to accept naturally phrased navigation queries, as part of our overall effort to create an in-vehicle information system which delivers information as requested while placing minimal cognitive load on the driver.

Title of Document: LONGITUDINAL SPACE-CHARGE WAVES INDUCED BY ENERGY MODULATIONS Brian L. Beaudoin, Master of Science, 2008 Directed By: Professor Patrick G. O’Shea and Professor Rami A. Kishek Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering High intensity beams that are space-charge dominated are important for applications such as free electron lasers that require high intensity and low emit...

Electronic Orientation Aids (EOA) usually guide visually impaired pedestrians using turn-by-turn instructions. However, several studies have demonstrated that mental representations of space seem difficult to build when turn-by-turn instructions only are provided. This is a crucial point as getting an accurate spatial representation of the surroundings can make the difference between successful...

A fast photodiode was demonstrated to be able to extract the turn by turn photon beam profile information of electron storage rings if the photodiode was operated at the saturated region. When applied this method to a 1.3 GeV synchrotron light source with 200 mA beam current, the synchrotron radiation intensity is not intense enough to saturate the photodiode. To apply this method to the type o...

Copy Summary: It has been found that humans not only tend to avoid the middle routes and prefer the peripheral routes among multiple choices, but also rely on the ‘initial segment strategy’ to select the route. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic which humans apply during route selection: Participants prefer the route whose initial direction lies in the direction of their final destinatio...

The objective of this traffic safety investigation was to find critical road sections using Postand Preaccident analysis approaches. The Post-accident approach analyzes the effect of road geometric characteristics on accident rate. The study was based on accident and road maintenance data in Western Sweden. A total of 2912 accidents from 2000 to 2005 on 1615 km median-separated roads was collec...