Caleb Southern

Ph.D. Student
School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
caleb DOT southern AT gatech.edu

My research is in the areas of Mobile Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing. Mobility is a fundamental element of the human condition.

Projects

BrailleTouch (iPhone app - type using braille on your touchscreen).
BrailleTouch research. Assistive technology for the visually impaired. BrailleTouch is a soft chorded keyboard for touchscreen smartphones, based on the standard Perkins Brailler keyboard.
(with Dr. Mario Romero, James Clawson, Brian Frey, Dr. Gregory D. Abowd )

Cycle Atlanta: Tracking the routes of bicycle riders with mobile technology to inform transportation planning.
(with Dr. Christopher A. Le Dantec, Dr. Kari Watkins )

Southern, C., Clawson, J., Frey, B., Abowd, G. D., Romero, M., "An Evaluation of BrailleTouch: Mobile Touchscreen Text Entry for the Visually Impaired." Mobile HCI 2012. San Francisco, September 2012. pdf
Frey, B., Rosier, K., Southern, C., Romero, M. "From Texting App to Braille Literacy." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Extended Abstracts, ACM CHI 2012. Austin, USA: May 2012. pdf
Romero, M., Frey, B., Southern, C., Abowd, G. D., "BrailleTouch: Designing a Mobile Eyes-Free Soft Keyboard." Mobile HCI 2011, Design Competition. Stockholm, August 2011. pdf poster video
Frey, B., Southern, C., Romero, M., "BrailleTouch: Mobile Texting for the Visually Impaired." Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction International, HCII. Orlando: July 2011. pdf

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2012.
1st Place, MobileHCI Design Competition, 2011. link
Honorable Mention, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2011.
Finalist, Innovation Contest. Georgia Tech Research and Innovation Conference (GTRIC), 2011.

Gold Record (Music Producer), Recording Industry Association of America. For sales of 500,000 units of Ben Folds Five, Whatever and Ever Amen, 1998.
Citizen Award, Independent Weekly magazine. For public policy advocacy that resolved 35-year transportation controversy, 2002. article

B.S. with Honors in 3 years, Mathematical Sciences: Computer Science Option. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996.

Term	Course	Title	Instructor	Grade
F 2012	CP 6311	Intro to Transportation Planning	Dr. Randall Guensler	A
			Dr. Catherine Ross
F 2012	LCC 8910	Special Problems: Human-Computer Interaction and Transportation Planning	Dr. Christopher A. Le Dantec	A
S 2012	CS 7455	Issues in Human-Centered Computing	Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt	A
F 2011	CS 7470	Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing	Dr. Gregory D. Abowd	A
F 2011	PSYC 6022	Statistics for HCI	Dr. Daniel Spieler	A
S 2011	CS 7450	Information Visualization	Dr. John T. Stasko	A
S 2011	CS 6750	Human-Computer Interaction	Dr. Melody Jackson	A
F 2010	CS 6456	Principles of User Interface Software	Dr. W. Keith Edwards	A
F 2010	CS 6455	Intro to Human-Centered Computing	Dr. Beki Grinter	A

Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing (CS 7470)
- Project: BrailleTouch: Automatic Error Correction for Text Entry on Touchscreen Tablets
  (with Harish Kothandaraman, Sudarsanan Krishnan, Joe Lin, Vignesh Somasundaram)
  Text entry on flat glass with no tactile landmarks is challenging, particularly when not looking at the screen. In previous work on BrailleTouch, I observed that blind users' hands tend to drift over time as they enter braille chords on a touchscreen, introducing typing errors. We designed and implemented two strategies for automatic correction of these errors: (1) an adaptive algorithm in which the soft buttons follow the user's hands through moving averages of the previous touch locations; and (2) a predictive algorithm which interprets the user's intended input word through the number of touches in each braille chord, the number of letters in the word, and the hamming distance from words in a dictionary. We evaluated these algorithms against raw touch event logs of the natural patterns of blind users typing braille on an Android touchscreen tablet. This work has applications for ubiquitous text entry and other multi-touch interactions on any flat surface instrumented for touch input.
Statistics for HCI (PSYC 6022)

Graphical User Interfaces, Java Swing
Project: PieTouch: A Hierarchical Circular Menu for Touchscreens
(with Sunil Garg)

Seminar class. Readings included Situated Action, Activity Theory, and Distributed Cognition.
Project: Survey Paper of Eyes-Free Mobile Interaction Techniques