Main Research Projects

The MERITT project proposes a coherent set of activities that have a positive impact on autonomy, social life, and learning new digital skills in the case of elderly people. We employ gamification and artificial intelligence to motivate and educate seniors. To this end we designed an entire ecosystem of software modules that cooperate in a distributed yet integrated way: monitor, virtual supervisor, personalized profiles manager, rewarding module, multiplayer games.

Obiectivul general al proiectului vizează creșterea capacității de cercetare a USV prin realizarea de investiții în infrastructura de tip CLOUD și integrarea acesteia în structuri internaționale de tip CLOUD și infrastructuri masive de date, în scopul ridicării nivelului de competitivitate științifică.

The goal of this project is to conceptualize, design, and implement new smart wearables and environments to empower users with new sensorimotor abilities. To this end, we introduce the concept of Sensorimotor Realities (SRs) as a new type of physical-digital reality, distinct from Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR), Mixed (MR), and Mediated Reality (XYR), with grounds in eXtended Reality (XR), motor control theory, and ability-based design. Applications of SRs target people with motor impairments, but also people without impairments, enabling them to experience new sensorimotor abilities with wearable computing, ambient intelligence, and XR immersive technologies.

In this project, we want to develop new input technology to increase the accessibility of smart wearable devices, such as smart glasses, smart watches, and smart rings, for people with upper-body motor impairments. To this end, we propose the novel concept of "motor-streamlined input" for wearable devices, which subsumes gesture input (in the form of either touch and multitouch, stroke-gestures, mid-air input, or head movements) and voice input (i.e., speech input and non-speech vocalizations) according to a design, implementation, and evaluation paradigm centered on the specific motor abilities of the end-user. The main result of this project will be an experimental model (level TRL-4) to enable motor-streamlined use of smart wearables for users with upper-body motor impairments. To validate the TRL-4 level, we plan practical implementations of gesture and voice input on wearable devices for people with and without motor impairments as well as corresponding technical performance evaluations and user studies. The project is proposed by Prof. Radu-Daniel Vatavu with expertise in gesture input, assistive technologies, and software architecture design, and will be conducted in the Machine Intelligence and Information Visualization Laboratory (MintViz), a research facility with state-of-the-art equipment for gesture and motion sensing.

The world-wide infectious disease COVID-19, identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, poses major threats to public health and to the global economy. COVID-19, caused by the new virus, Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is characterized by a severe acute respiratory syndrome. The virus has attained various stages of evolution and understanding this evolution and the patterns of its transmission after penetrating a new populations is crucial for designing effective disease control and prevention strategies. Therefore, the general objective of the project is to develop techniques for monitoring the pathogenicity of circulating strains in different geographical regions of Romania, in relation to the phenotypic expression of infection in asymptomatic and mild, moderate and severe SARS-CoV-2 positive individuals. The evaluation of the potential of the virus to adapt to human organisms will be determined by genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis.

In this project, we want to develop new interactive technology to deliver a better understanding of the visual world to people with visual impairments, but also to people with normal vision, who may find themselves in life situations where sensory augmentation could help avoid unwanted outcomes, e.g., the ability to see clearer, closer or farther away than allowed by the naked eye, or to receive sensory feedback about other events when visual attention is overwhelmed. To this end, we plan to understand and leverage the possibilities offered by smart wearables, e.g., smart glasses, smart watches, rings, armbands, etc., to enhance visual perception for people with and without visual impairments.

In this project, we plan to design and develop efficient, low-effort, and fluent interactions for smart environments that enable task shifting from the center to the periphery of user attention. To this end, we will resort to human motion capture, eye-gaze tracking, and electroencephalography (EEG) analysis to propose new input techniques for users to interact with their smart surroundings effectively and with low cognitive effort.

In this project, we want to make touch-screen technology more accessible to people with motor impairments. To this end, we will develop a new technology to assist motor impaired people in touch-screen input by using eye gaze tracking, speech recognition, and electroencephalography analysis techniques. Our goal is to understand the effects of motor impairments on the touch gesture performance of people with motor impairments and, using that understanding, to propose a novel and efficient technology to help users overcome their motor impairment in the context of touch-screen interaction.

Given the large number of elderly in the future, limiting the negative effects of non-adoption of ICT by future elderly (i.e.social exclusion) and stimulating the positive effects (which, on an aggregate scale might provide a solution for the financial problems related to the graying of the population), becomes an important task for public policies. In this context, the main goal of this project is to develop an elderly-friendly platform and associated tools for assisting elderly people to maintain a healthy lifestyle in their homes.

Emotion recognition has become a "must have" for all system that want to inspire user's confidence and to interact in a friendly and familiar way. In this project we want to obtain an improved CBST (Computer Based Speech Therapy System) architecture by using multimodal (i.e. paralanguage, visual, and physiological parameters) emotion recognition techniques. The project aims to deal with the assessment of the affective state of the children with speech disorders.

The project proposal targets interdisciplinary research (computer science, psychology, electronics) - having as main objective the development of methods, models, algorithms, System on Chip architectures with regards to the elaboration and implementation of a complete system addressing the therapy of dyslalia affecting pre scholars, in a personalized and user centered manner. We are considering the development of a complete system composed of the logopaed's desktop PC and a mobile device with a friendly easy to use interface for the pre scholar to work with during his home activities (serving as a homework device).