LesleyAxelrod's Home Page

Please see my Brunel Home Pages for more details

My research interests centre on how people communicate with technology, and designing computer systems with usable interfaces to prevent communication from breaking down or proving unsatisfactory. I am particularly interested in assistive technologies and recognition technologies. As well as computing experience, I have a background in Human Communication Science, working as a speech and language therapist and researching in related health service fields. Because of my experiences with the elderly, young children and the disabled, I am an advocate for inclusive systems that  take into account the needs of the whole population and aim to empower.  I am also particularly interested in aspects of change management associated with implementing information systems.

My current PhD project is based at Brunel University, Department of Information Systems and Computing (DISC), where I am part of the VIVID research group. My supervisors are Kate Hone and Steve Love.  I am researching the use of emotion recognition in computing, from the user perspective.  This is an EPSRC funded research project that started in October 2002 to investigate how giving computers the ability to recognise human emotions might contribute to human-computer interaction (EPSRC grant ref: GR/R81374/01) The research project aims to evaluate the potential for emotion recognition technology to improve the quality of human-computer interaction.

I am conducting an experiment in the Brunel usability laboratories, using 2X2 factorial design, to investigate the extent to which individuals display their emotions, when they believe they are interacting with a system that can recognise their emotions, or when they are interacting with a system that appears to react to some of their emotions..  As we do not yet have fully functional emotional recognition systems my work involves the use of Wizard of Oz (WOZ) methods.

Our project has been featured in an interactive exhibit about affective computing at Birmingham's Thinktank Science Museum where visitors can interact with Emo Shun - an emotional robotic head built by Noel Sharkey from Sheffield (of Robotwars fame). Emo displays a range of emotional faces and has some programming built in to capture the audience reaction. Emo's successor 'Fripp' is in the planning stages, and will be set up for single person interaction with a tracking camera to keep track of faces.