2016-08-31: Meghan Chandarana and Erica Meszaros Summer 2016 Exit Presentation

Meghan Chandarana is a PhD student in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who first joined the Ai as an intern last summer. Erica Meszaros, who has been with the Ai as an intern since January, recently received a Masters from Eastern Michigan University and is currently continuing her studies at the University of Chicago. Together, they presented the results of their research developing a natural language interface for non-expert autonomous UAV management as part of this summer's HOLII GRAILLE.

Meghan created a gesture node for the system, while Erica created a speech node, both of which could create flight commands independently or in cooperation with each other. In their user study, the results of the speech and gesture nodes were compared against user performance on a mouse-based interface– something they knew subjects would be familiar with and comfortable using.

The results of their user study were promising– as you'll see– and both Meghan and Erica foresee advancements and applications for this summer's research.