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Food journaling refers to the idea of logging food intake with specific details such as calorie count, food ingredients, among other things. Such practice often relies on self-reports, which is prone to recall bias. Even logging during the time of food intake, depending on the context, a user might not be well-informed to log every detail of a food journaling application. Our goal of the project is to improve the user experience of food journaling by minimizing the response burden and utilizing the context of users.

Pretend play helps children develop a wide range of cognitive skills and is, therefore, a critically important skill for kids to learn. Some children, such as those on the Autism Spectrum, have difficulties engaging in pretend play. This project seeks to understand and model what constitutes successful pretend to play in order to design and implement technologies to support and facilitate highly engaging pretend to play. The exact nature of that intervention is an open question, and we are exploring several exciting options including a robotic play partner and an immersive virtual play world.

Robotics has been considered as one of the five key technology areas for defense against attacks with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, due to the mass impact nature of WMD, failures of counter-WMD (C-WMD) missions can have catastrophic consequences. To ensure robots' success in carrying out C-WMD missions, we have developed a novel verification framework in providing performance guarantees for behavior-based and probabilistic robot algorithms in complex real-world environments. We cannot assume the luxury of a do-over; we must get it right the first time.