Yee Chieh Chew

[pronounced "Yee-Chay"]

Current Project

Graph and Number line Input and Exploration (GNIE)

 

The GNIE tool allows sighted, low vision, and blind students to find and plot points on a number line or graph, as well as answer questions about a number line or coordinate plane. It is a Java program that will run on current Windows and Macintosh systems.

 

GNIE is currently being deployed at a school for the blind, and I am studying the impact of introducing this technology into a classroom. I am interested in assessing how GNIE changes class dynamics and in evaluating how this tool performs in a real-world environment.

 

More information on this project

 

Past Projects

MusEEGk: A Brain-Computer Musical Interface

 

This project integrates a brain-computer interface (BCI) - a tool that translates neural signals into a digital output - with a music step sequencer composition program. Using the brain's P300 response measured using EEG, this interface allows a user to create and modify a melody in real time and provides continuous aural and visual feedback to the user, affording them a controllable means to achieve creative expression.

 

Tweetsters: Social Visualization for Micro-Blogging Analysis

 

In this project, we created Tweetsters, a visualization tool for exploring trends and chatter on Twitter. It is a multi-view interactive interface with features that include: a trendline, text clouds, geovisualization, tweets, and a method for comparing two keywords. It was implemented using Java and tested informally on a dataset of about 600,000 tweets. The interface provides a unique way to display the large and largely unstructured data from Twitter.

 

Understanding Pre-diabetes Intervention

 

This short-term project aimed to identify the mechanisms involved in initiating and maintaining lifestyle change in people with pre-diabetes. The goal of the project was to create a digital intervention targeted at people with pre-diabetes who have limited time and/or resources.

 

An fNIR based BCI for Continuous Control Drawing

 

Another brain-computer interface project, this one used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) which measures blood flow to certain parts of the brain when it's active. Using fNIR, we sought to create an interface for drawing using letters as templates. The user would activate and deactivate an area of their brain to control the drawing movement - like controlling a moving cursor using a knob. It kind of worked.

 

Supporting Parent-child Communication in Divorced Families

 

In one of my first projects before grad school, I helped analyze interviews with separated families and how they used technology to communicate when they are apart. The data from this analysis was used to present implications for design that may aid in creating technologies to support communication between parents and young children in divorced families.