Wakefield and Kieras win Best Paper Award at ICAD 2014

Profs. Gregory Wakefield and David Kieras, along with three coauthors from the Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH, received the Best Paper Award at the 20th International Conference on Auditory Display, which was held at New York University on June 22 – 25, 2014.

The paper, entitled EPIC Modeling of a Two-Talker CRM Listening Task, addresses a common problem in the design of auditory displays, which is how to manage multiple sources so that the user can maximize the information gained from each acoustic source. The paper explores the use of a cognitive architecture, EPIC (Executive/Process-Interactive Control), to model human performance in a two-talker listening task. EPIC is one among several architectures whose goal is to provide a comprehensive account of human abilities and limitations in perception, cognition, and action, and the paper proposes a strategy for a twotalker listening task and modified production rules to provide a corpus-driven model that accounts for human performance in the listening task.

Prof. Kieras’ research activities are in the area of applied and theoretical cognitive psychology, with specific interests in human-computer interaction, cognitive simulation modeling, human performance, complex human learning, and natural language processing. His research approach is to construct computational models for the cognitive processes involved in tasks that have practical importance, validate the models against empirical data, and prepare them for practical application.

Prof. Wakefield’s research interests are in the areas of audio and music processing, vocal pedagogy, psychoacoustics, and sound quality engineering. His work integrates what we know about hearing with what we know about sound producing objects to create and develop a variety of interactive systems. He is also interested in exploring fundamental aspects of auditory perception and in the integration of what we learn from these studies into models of cognitive architecture.

Prof. Kieras received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. After a two-year R.K. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon, he joined the Psychology Department as Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona. In 1984, he joined the faculty of CSE at the University of Michigan where he also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. Prof. Kieras received the Jack A. Kraft Innovator Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 2010. He is a member of the CHI Academy and is affiliated with the Interactive Systems Lab in CSE.

Prof. Wakefield received a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1985 and a PhD in Psychology in 1988, both from the University of Minnesota. He joined the EECS faculty at Michigan in 1986. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, has received the IEEE Millennium Medal, and the Service Excellence Award from the College of Engineering. He is affiliated with the Interactive Systems Lab.