Vizer selected to CHI 2009 Conference Doctoral Consortium

Date Posted: - 2/13/2009

Lisa Vizer, a Doctoral Candidate and Research Assistant with the IS Department, recently was accepted to the CHI Doctoral Consortium which will take place April 4 through 9, 2009 in Boston, MA.

The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for Doctoral students to explore and develop their research interests in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers. It also will offer students a unique opportunity to share their dissertation work with students in a similar situation as well as senior researchers in the field to offer fresh perspectives and future research directions.

Vizer, who is only 1 of about 15 doctoral students selected for The Consortium—a closed-door workshop during the CHI Conference, will interact in a supportive community of scholars who embrace the spirit of collaborative research. Ms. Vizer, whose research paper is entitled, Detecting Physical and Cognitive Fatigue through Typing Behavior, will have an opportunity to present her work at The Consortium to other doctoral students and an interdisciplinary research panel. As Ms. Vizer explains, “Monitoring of cognitive and physical function is central to the care of people with or at risk for various health conditions, but existing solutions rely on intrusive methods that are inadequate for continuous tracking. My research explores the possibility of detecting cognitive and physical stress by monitoring keyboard interactions with the eventual goal of detecting acute or chronic changes in cognitive and physical function.”

Vizer’s preliminary research results indicate that it is possible to classify cognitive and physical stress conditions relative to non-stress conditions based on keystroke and text features with accuracy rates comparable to those currently obtained using affective computing methods. The proposed approach is attractive because it requires no additional hardware, is unobtrusive, is adaptable to each user, and is very low cost. Vizer says, “I’m looking forward to this opportunity as a way to improve my work through insights from some of the best researchers and fellow students in the field.”