Speaker profile: Jon Malkin

Saturday 1:30 - 2:00: Vocal Joystick

Jon Malkin is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington in the next several quarters. He hopes to finish in the next couple quarters.

Jon’s interests include statistical pattern recognition, with a recent foray into semi-supervised learning, and signal processing, especially as it relates to voice. His dissertation work involves a novel probabilistic classifier which lacks the low-entropy bias found in most popular classifiers.

Jon’s current project, and the topic of his talk, the Vocal Joystick (VJ), an assistive device for individuals with motor impairment. The VJ provides speakers with continuous control of devices such as mouse pointers or simple robotic arms using non-speech vocalizations. The system is simple and robust enough that hundreds of schoolchildren have successfully used the system over the past several years during public demos.

ssli.ee.washington.edu/~jsm/
ssli.ee.washington.edu/vj/