Erin Brady, VizWiz Social
This project extends the VizWiz tool for blind users by allowing them to send video questions to their social networks via Twitter, Facebook, or email. We intend to perform a study with this tool that gives us insight into how comfortable people feel asking personal questions to members of their social networks, compared to anonymous workers.
Walter Lasecki, Nonlinear Planning as Satisfiability
Planning as satisfiability has proven to be a very effective method for solving the classical planning problem, but is limited to fully observable, deterministic spaces. We extend the encoding from the STRIPS language to include planning under uncertainty.
Anna Loparev, How Sighted (and Blind) Users Experience the Web
Many people, both sighted and blind, use the internet on a daily basis to do a wide variety of activities. However, exactly how they perform these tasks may differ. Our goal is to discover what elements of a website users focus on and what this information tells us about the website's usability. In this presentation, we limit our focus to sighted users.
Jansen Orfan, Similarity Among OWL Classes in the Same Ontology
Traditional methods for scoring similarity amongst concepts in an ontology rely on the explicit structure of a tree. These methods cannot be directly applied to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) which offers a more expressive and complex structure.
Adam Purtee, Selection of Clauses for Improved Factoid Reliability
I show that constraining input to Knext according to sentence structure can affect the quality of factoids generated.
Jacob Scheiber, Working Towards a Functional Bootstrapping Natural Language Parser
A bootstrapping language parser is one which uses semantic knowledge to guide parsing of ambiguous sentences. In this work we endeavour to establish a real-world knowledge base for such a parser by identifying reliable patterns of predication in sentences that can then be used as input to the KNEXT system to generate true logical statements about the world.