For more information please visit
http://www.cse.yorku.ca/seminars/colloquia.html

Date: Friday, Nov. 30
Time: 1:00pm
Location: CSE 3033
Host: Melanie Baljko

         Smart "Language-Output" Interfaces: iGraph-Lite's present
        development, lessons learned and some ideas for the future.

                           Leo Ferres
                  Human-Oriented Technology Lab
                       Carleton University


In this talk, I will present and discuss the current state of
development of iGraph-Lite, an assistive technology built in
collaboration with Statistics Canada and Cognos, Inc. to help blind
and visually-impaired people gain access to visual representations of
numerical data (e.g. line graphs, bar charts, etc.). I will start by
discussing our latest paper on iGraph (available at
http://alba.carleton.ca/assets.pdf). I will follow by discussing our
newest results in representation and reasoning with graphical data and
the sublanguage used to communicate graphical information, and will
conclude with an outlook of iGraph's future.

Bio

Dr. Leo Ferres received his Ph.D. degree in cognitive science from
Carleton University in 2004. From 2001 to 2004, he worked as a
consultant in companies in Ottawa, Spain and the United States
researching, designing and deploying speech-enabled applications. In
2004, he became a Research Fellow at the Human-Oriented Technology
Laboratory at Carleton University and a Senior Research Associate in
2006. He also holds an Adjunct Research Professor position in the
Institute of Cognitive Science. Dr. Ferres' research interests are in
knowledge representation and reasoning with graphical representations
(work funded by NSERC and Cognos, Inc.) and in assistive technologies
and natural language engineering (work funded by Statistics Canada and
NSERC). He is now a visiting researcher at the Human Communication
Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh until January 2008.



Minas E. Spetsakis
Dept. of Computer Science
York University
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