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Honours projects 2009

Projects supervised by Eric Choi (NICTA) and Vera Chung

Cognitive Load Measurement via Speech – The Software Toolkit
Cognitive load is variously described as the level of perceived mental effort associated with thinking and reasoning in a human. Tasks performed under stressful conditions, or requiring complex hand/eye coordination can markedly increase cognitive load, and thus potentially interfere with other thought processes and consequently reduce overall task performance. If a user’s existing level of cognitive load can be assessed in real time, an intelligent system could potentially adapt its behaviours to implement strategies that reduce the cognitive load and correspondingly increase the task performance. While the concept of cognitive load itself may be more a theoretical construct, its measurement can lead to numerous real-world applications, e.g. in call centres for gathering customer emotional intelligence, and in electronic gaming for tailoring the plots according to a gamer’s cognitive and emotional states.

We have been researching a non-intrusive and online speech based method for measuring cognitive load by analysing speech data gradually over a series of tasks. The existing software tools require the use of Matlab libraries and are mostly designed for research purpose. This project aims to design and implement a new set of software tools which are more platform-independent and user-friendly.

Research Environment
The selected student will work with a team of senior researchers in the field of human-computer interaction, in the newly built NICTA premises at the Australian Technology Park.

Novelty and Contribution
Cognitive load measurement via speech is a novel and promising field of research. This measurement method will provide a direct and objective measurement that overcomes many of the shortcomings of other indirect and subjective methods. It will enable researchers and developers to build intelligent systems that are adaptive to a user’s cognitive load.

Expected Outcomes
The student must have excellent software development and programming skills (Java/C/C++). Good result in AI or Data Mining course is a plus. It is expected that an API will be implemented for the core functions, and a small application will be built to verify and showcase the new toolkit.

Reference Materials