Alexander Nelson’s colloquium will be Thursday, Jan. 30 at 3:30 p.m. in Avery 115. A reception will be held after at 4:30 p.m.

“Hardware/Software Co-Design for Pervasive Accessibility”

Abstract: Despite twelve percent of Americans identifying as having some type of disability, Information and Computing Technology (ICT) often fails to consider disability as a design factor. This failure manifests as a barrier to technology adoption, exacerbating existing economic disadvantages to persons with disability. Assistive technology (AT) provides solutions to some of the challenges faced by these users. Realization of successful AT systems requires a cross-layer approach, including expertise ranging from circuits and signal-processing, through machine-learning and natural language processing. Adaptable systems that emerge from a cross-layer approach are best poised to allow persons with disabilities to interface with Cyber-Physical systems at large. This talk will focus on leveraging hardware/software co-design to create adaptable and pervasive AT. To that end, a wearable gesture recognition platform is introduced that is configurable and approachable to users with a wide range of mobility. The gesture recognition is then extended to consider continuous motion recognition for privacy-preserving remote rehabilitation.

Short bio: Alexander Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the University of Arkansas. He is the director of the ÆSIR (Applied Embedded Systems and IoT Research) Laboratory. Alexander graduated with his PhD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) as a member of the Eclipse research cluster while co-advised by Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee and Dr. Ryan Robucci. He is broadly interested in Embedded and Distributed systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Assistive Technology, Wearable Computing, and Smart-City/Smart-Community research. His research focuses on hardware/software co-design for wearable and distributed systems. Alexander received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) honorable mention as well as the IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing (PerCom) Best-Demo runner up. Alexander completed the M.S. and B.S. in Computer Engineering at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.