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Oliver Creighton
Visiting Scholar

No longer a member of RI.

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Research interests

WebManual is a web-enabled technical manual display system that enables workers in the field to use Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETM). These manuals look like traditional manuals except that they are displayed electronically in a web browser, and can also embed behavior (for example, asking questions of the user and incorporating the answers) making them interactive.

Oliver's current research is focussed on speech-enabling a version of WebManu al. The research is motivated by the fact that in the past workers in the field have indicated that this system would be more user-friendly if it was voice-enabled. For example, if a field worker could ask the WebManual system to display the next page, go back a page, repeat a step, etc., it would free up both of his/her hands to perform the work-related tasks. In addition, if the product could also read the text pages to the field worker as he/she performs the work, there would be no need for the field worker to look at a display device.

• What are the requirements for this system to be usable (from a perspective of response time, percentage of correctly recognized commands, fault tolerance and comprehensibility of the speech output)? [requirements]
• Can the envisioned speech recognition features be integrated into the existing WebManual system with currently available hardware/software? [design]
• Does the usability statement still stand in environments that are less-than-optimal for spoken language communication (noisy environments with high speech interference levels)? [test-cases]

Other research projects Oliver has been working on include

• Building a web-based communication infrastructure for supporting collaborative distributed software development using Lotus Notes [conducted at CMU]
• Developing Smartcard and Point-Of-Sale (POS) applications for Daimler-Benz ( JAMES project) [conducted at the department for Applied Software Engineering at Technische Univ ersität München (TUM)]
• Simulation of perception thresholds using a quantitative model of the signal processing in the auditory systems [conducted at the department for Human Computer Interaction (Mensch-Maschine-Kom munikation) at TUM]

Research interest keywords

acoustics, human-computer interaction, inspection, natural language processing, rapid prototyping, and speech generation and recognition

Additional Interests and Responsibilities

I am currently working on my diploma thesis (Diplomarbeit) which is a required 6 months research project for german students at Technische Universität München (TUM). The work done can roughly be compared to a Masters project in the US.