Research Interests
Here you will find outlines of my present and past research projects and general research interests.
Spatial Annotation of Photographs (Project Tripod)
Project TRIPOD Website.
More to come soon.
Destination Descriptions in Urban Environments (PhD. research)
An important difference exists between the way humans communicate route knowledge and the turn-by-turn route directions provided by the majority of current navigation services. Navigation
services present route directions with the same amount of detail regardless the route segment’s significance in the instructions, user’s distance from the destination, and
finally the level of user’s familiarity with particular parts of the environment.
In human-generated route directions, references are made to a simplified structure of the environment, and are communicated hierarchically. Route directions are exchanged while assuming a shared knowledge of the
coarse environment’s structure. Such destination descriptions provide an increased amount of detail as the description approaches the proximity of the destination of the route.
This research resulted in a formal, executable model of destination descriptions, enabling the selection of references from an integrated spatial dataset. Automated creation of directions with a variable level of detail improves the ability to reflect the alteration of local conditions. The model is grounded in the pragmatic communication theory of relevance. The
resulting route directions created by the model are usually shorter, easier to memorize, and referring to prominent spatial objects in the city. Thus, their processing should lower the cognitive workload of the wayfinder. The benefactors of such a system are wayfinders frequently traveling to
unfamiliar destinations in partially-known urban environments, such as police, emergency management and tourism services, but also locals—everyday users of Web based navigation portals.