The Women’s Law Society and the Family Law Society co-hosted a panel Oct. 28 of domestic violence experts at the Earle Mack School of Law. Panel members discussed past and current issues in domestic violence in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Kim Hollenback of the Women’s Law Society kicked off the event by introducing each of the five panel members and explaining their experience in the field. Renee Norris-Jones, an advocate volunteer of Women Against Abuse, was joined by fellow member Lonnie Snyder, who serves as a community awareness representative with WAA. Also in attendance were Sgt. Randy Crawford, representing the Philadelphia Police Department; Diana Baquero of the Family Law Unit at Philadelphia Legal Assistance; and John Maxwell, an assistant teaching professor with a background in law enforcement.

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Hollenback initiated the conversation by asking the panel to explain the prevalence of domestic abuse in our society. Norris-Jones, a survivor of abuse, informed the audience that one in three women experience domestic violence in their lifetime. Baquero added to this by saying that 11,714 people filed petitions for protection from abuse orders in Philadelphia alone, out of which about 30 percent were approved. In order to acquire a PFA, a plaintiff must petition his or her case to an intake worker, who then forwards the petition on to a judge. If approved, the PFA can address a number of issues, including temporary support, custody and financial reimbursements. Though these PFAs grant the victim a degree of protection, they are not always effective. Norris-Jones used her own story to exemplify the failings of the PFA system.

“When I first got it, that paper felt like it was going to be a shield. I quickly found out that wasn’t the case,” Norris-Jones said.

Despite receiving a PFA, Norris-Jones’ husband continued to batter her, and the police did little to help. Crawford explained that the police response has evolved greatly since that time. In the event of a PFA violation, the police are required to arrest the batterer, making domestic violence a misdemeanors that can result in an arrest — even if the police weren’t a direct witness to the event.

Crawford also listed signs of a potential abuser and advice for women to avoid domestic violence. He said, “You can go out there and have fun, but you have to think.”

Having been in the field for a number of years, Crawford expressed his frustration with women who make excuses to stay in the abusive relationship. Norris-Jones replied that leaving an abuser is often a psychologically and financially difficult process. In her own situation, her family members accused her of abandoning her marriage, despite the injuries her husband had inflicted on her.

“In addition to needing the intestinal fortitude to go ahead with [leaving], sometimes your own family can actually be an impediment,” Maxwell said.

He went on to say that not leaving has consequences for other members of the family. Children of an abusive relationship may grow up to assume the roles of the batterer, for boys, or the victim, for girls.

Hollenback switched the conversation to the subject of domestic violence on the college campus. Snyder, a Drexel alumnus and former president of Drexel’s One in Four organization, explained that our own University lacks a dedicated infrastructure to support victims of domestic abuse. As for improvements to the legal system, Baquero explained that the enactment of Civil Gideon would help victims get greater access to lawyers.

After completing the set of prepared questions for the panel, Hollenback opened the floor for questions from the audience.

In the dessert reception that followed, audience members had the opportunity to interact with the panel members. Alisha Lubin, a second-year law student and president of the Women’s Law Society, commented on the success of the event. “It was important to us to bring awareness because we haven’t had a discussion about how we law students could get involved.”

Tamara Sharp, a second-year law student and president of the Family Law Society, added to this by saying, “I thought the panelists had great insight. The flow of conversation was really good.”

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Michael Bernstein spoke about his research in crowd-powered systems Aug. 20 to students and faculty at Drexel’s ExCITe Center.

Following a brief introduction, Bernstein announced the subject of his lecture, crowd-powered systems, which he defined as “a way that we can reach out to the intelligence distributed on the Internet and pull it into the kinds of things we use every day.”

Bernstein discussed the subject of Microsoft Word. Although this interface is one of the most highly developed pieces of computer software, it is limited only to helping the user with layout, spelling and grammar.

“It’s not actually helping with the core task it sets out to do — that is, writing,” Bernstein said.

More complex tasks, such as composing or editing a document, are left to the user. Bernstein explained that the process of peer review can be integrated into software like Microsoft Word by using crowd-powered systems. Through a number of programs, the software will take a written piece and put it online for editing.

“I want to picture a world in which I can push my text out and get an entire crowd of people to work with me to improve it,” he said. This way of using human intelligence to support an interactive system is the essence of the crowd-powered system.

Soylent is one such system that uses a crowd built into a word processor. One of the features, called Shortn, can help users decrease the word count of their pieces. This is an issue that often arises when academics want to submit a scholarly article for review, but the draft is over the designated word limit.

Users can submit sections of their papers that they want shortened by selecting the Shortn option, prompting the tool to submit that section online for review. Members of the Internet community can then make the appropriate edits, and the system would compile the results into a shortened, finished product.

This setup typically runs by paid crowdsourcing, in which the online editors are incentivized by small payments to complete an assigned task. By editing a paragraph, for example, a member of the crowd could earn 10 cents, a payment that could accumulate as the crowd member completes more tasks.

The difficulty in this type of approach to crowd-powered systems is that the responses may be of poor quality and may take too long. Researchers in this field have come up with a 30 percent rule, which dictates, “Thirty percent of the results in open-ended questions come back with poor results,” Bernstein said.

Two personas complicate the functioning of programs like Soylent. The “lazy worker” does the bare minimum to complete the task, whereas the “eager beaver” does more than what is asked. The responses from these two categories of crowd members produce a suboptimal result. Bernstein cut to the heart of the problem by saying, “We lack design patterns.”

He suggested applying a find-fix-verify design pattern to the tasks submitted to crowd.

“The idea is we take these open-ended tasks and decompose it into this set of three stages to produce far, far better results,” Bernstein said. This will give a specific structure to the tasks assigned to the crowd in a way that reigns in both the lazy worker and the eager beaver personas.

The second complication with the Soylent approach is that of response times. Although the time between accepting the task and completing the task averages to two minutes, the time between when the task was posted and when the task was accepted is much longer, about 20 minutes. Bernstein proposed to resolve the latter lag time by incorporating the retainer model, which keeps crowd users on call so they can be alerted and respond immediately when a task is posted.

Rapid refinement also helps to streamline the crowdsourcing process. This strategy employs a synchronous crowd — a crowd in which all the members are present at once — to encourage social loafing. Although social loafing is generally a bad phenomenon, it can be used to relieve the pressure that a crowd member may feel to produce the best result, and it therefore decreases the time between accepting and completing a task.

Bernstein said he has high hopes for this method. “I’m going to make a claim that we can actually get these synchronous crowds to act faster in aggregate than even the single, fastest individual member,” he said.

Studies show that rapid refinement is not only the fastest strategy but also the most precise. Studies go even further to show that the combined powers of rapid refinement and the retainer model cut down the time that it takes to get results to less than 10 seconds.

According to Bernstein, software such as Soylent has helped to bring crowd-powered systems to where they are today; however, there is still more to come. The future of crowdsourcing includes the possibility of creating full-time crowd professionals, complete with the questions of contract ethics and education due to the gradual increase in complexity of tasks.

“I hope I have convinced you that we can create these crowd-powered systems that [do] things that neither crowds can do right now nor machine intelligence can do [by] itself,” Bernstein said.

Audience members brought up issues of authorship in a document that has been crowdsourced and whether or not crowdsourced documents can be fairly compared to those produced by more traditional methods.

Anna Lu, a sophomore biomedical engineering major, attended the lecture after receiving an invite by email. She came out of an interest in both the human and technological aspects of the lecture and said following the lecture, “It seems that crowdsourcing can be applied in many different areas, and I’m really excited to see some medical applications of it come forth as a biomedical engineer.”

Youngmoo Kim, director of the ExCITe Center, had invited Bernstein to deliver his lecture because he felt that the message was in line with the center’s goal to achieve a multidisciplinary collaboration.

“Better understanding [of] that relationship between computers and humans, I think, is to everyone’s benefit,” Kim said.

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Drexel professor Stephen Lankenau and his team of researchers have received the first National Institutes of Health grant for a large public health study, which started July 1, of medical marijuana use in young adults.

Lankenau, an associate professor in the Department of Community Health and Prevention, said he hopes that the study will provide data to help compare and contrast medical marijuana patients and nonmedical marijuana users.

The R01 grant awarded to the study, titled “Medical Marijuana, Emerging Adults & Community: Connecting Health and Policy,” will provide $3.3 million in funds over the course of the next five years. Lankenau will recruit 380 individuals from Los Angeles who are between the ages of 18 and 26, including both medical marijuana patients and nonmedical marijuana users, according to a Drexel news release.

Following an initial interview upon recruitment, participants will be tracked over the course of three more interviews. While the study will generate a sizable amount of quantitative data, Lankenau said he also plans to interview a subsample of 40 nonmedical marijuana users to gain insight into the qualitative aspects of the participants’ drug use. The data collected in Los Angeles will be relayed back to Drexel, where Lankenau and a group of graduate students will work on data analysis.

This study emerged as a line of investigation into the medical marijuana phenomenon that has swept the nation over the past few decades. The movement began in California, where Proposition 215 was passed in 1996, legalizing the use of medical marijuana. Today, 18 states and the District of Columbia have approved similar legislation, and still other states, including Pennsylvania, have legislation pending.

Lankenau explained that the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), a division of the NIH, has decided to investigate this topic further in order to better inform the public on the benefits and risks of marijuana use.

In 2010 NIDA put out a request for proposals for studies on medical marijuana. Lankenau responded and was granted the funds to carry out his study proposal.

This was a landmark event in the study of marijuana use because “[NIDA] wasn’t soliciting or encouraging investigators to do research on medical marijuana up until that point,” Lankenau said.

Lankenau developed an interest in the issue of marijuana use and misuse in a previous study that he had conducted in Los Angeles.

“We found some things that intrigued us and formed the basis of some hypotheses,” Lankenau said.

The current study that Lankenau leads is centered on similar foundational hypotheses, which he hopes will be proven or disproven by studying the two groups over the next five years.

“We’re going to be able to compare those two groups in a variety of different ways,” he said.

The first hypothesis is termed the legitimate patient hypothesis. Medical marijuana is typically prescribed to patients with chronic pains, anxiety, AIDS or any other health condition that cannot be treated pharmaceutically.

Opponents of marijuana use argue that patients could be faking ailments, so the study also hopes to compare the medical histories of the two groups in order to assess the legitimacy of the patients’ claims. Furthermore, the study aims to provide information on the use of marijuana as a medicine.

The interviews conducted in LA, headed by co-investigator Ellen Iverson, will ask patients about the efficacy of marijuana in relieving their symptoms in order to evaluate its properties as a medicine. Lankenau also predicts that the results of this study will offer insight into the gateway hypothesis.

Marijuana has been termed a gateway drug, suggesting that it leads users to harder drugs such as cocaine or heroin. Lankenau stated that this assumption is not necessarily true.

“The problem is that most people who use marijuana don’t usually transition into other drugs, but those who use harder drugs have also used marijuana,” Lankenau said. To tackle this debate, the study will compare the effects of marijuana use on each group.

Another hypothesis seeks to answer the question of the protective effect of legalized marijuana. Previous research in the Netherlands, where recreational marijuana use is legal, has suggested that the legalization of marijuana may convert the drug from a stepping stone to a stepping-off point.

“Once these individuals had regular access to marijuana, they stepped off harder drug use, so it served as a kind of a protective factor,” Lankenau said.

Applying this concept to his study, Lankenau said he hopes to determine if medical marijuana patients have lower rates of harder drug use compared to recreational marijuana users.

Though the participants enter the study as either medical marijuana patients or nonmedical marijuana users, Lankenau is interested in looking into the crossovers between the groups and determining the impetus behind the switch from legal to illegal use and vice versa.

For example, the closure of a local dispensary may prompt an individual with a physician’s recommendation to start buying his or her supply on the black market out of convenience. He said he hopes that data describing these conversions will help develop a natural history of marijuana use among both medical marijuana patients and nonmedical users.

The data collected in the course of the study may also lead to findings that were not previously anticipated.

“In the course of learning about one group, you learn about another,” Lankenau explained.

Historically, the subject of marijuana use has been a hotbed of controversy. Though there are studies that suggest marijuana has medicinal properties, the drug is currently classified as a Schedule I drug, meaning that it has no significant medical uses and presents a high risk of addiction. This categorization puts marijuana in the same class of drugs as ecstasy, LSD and heroin.

While physicians cannot prescribe Schedule I drugs, they can write a recommendation for patients that present a particular array of health problems. Patients likely to receive a recommendation for medical marijuana typically present issues that cannot be satisfied by normal pharmaceutical options. These recommendations are then taken to a dispensary, which serves as a legal storefront for marijuana.

California has more dispensaries than any other state that has approved the use of medical marijuana.

“Whereas the entire state of New Jersey has one dispensary, the city of Los Angeles alone has 500 to 1,000,” Lankenau said.

He added that the profusion of dispensaries has made it hard to gauge the number of existing dispensaries accurately. California put the issue out to voters, and Amendment D recently passed by a statewide referendum. The bill hopes to bring the number of dispensaries from the thousands to the hundreds, but Lankenau cautioned that this new legislation would be difficult to enforce.

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The Design Futures Lab hosted an exhibition July 9 featuring the work of six graduate students in the Master of Interior Architecture and Design program. The event, titled “Projects: 12/13,” took place in the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery of The URBN Annex.

The six students had the challenge of creating multidisciplinary designs with concepts of aesthetics and materialist philosophies that improve the human experience.

Nicole Koltick, assistant professor in the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design and director of the Design Futures Lab, explained that this design-led research model gives students the opportunity to take charge of a diverse team of experts.

“I really want these to be the next generation of design leaders,” Koltick said.

Megan Mitchell presented her attempt to revolutionize the process of decompression in “Technology at the Threshold: Reimagining the Entry Procession.” Mitchell explained that personal technology has created a world buzzing with sensory stimuli, resulting in a state of digital dislocation that leaves people feeling out of place and out of source.

Mitchell’s project is one of the latest in a range of case studies that investigate the means by which people can escape from the various distractions of their worlds. Specifically, Mitchell used the design of a household entrance to assist in the physical and mental transition involved in entering the home environment.

“This threshold is a procession to help you shed wherever you came from and allows you to be open to wherever you’re going,” Mitchell said.

The use of ambient light at various points in the entrance serves to give a warm welcome, while the intensity of the light adjusts in proportion to the number of people at home, giving the person entering an indication of the state of affairs in the house. Other features of this entrance include an exfoliating air wash to brush off the dirt from outside, a network phase break that severs electronic connections and suppresses sound, and a re-entry/reconnect section that facilitates the final phase of transition into the home. The overall design of the structure is also conducive to relaxation; the triangular subunits never convene to one specific focal point, allowing the viewer’s eyes to wander aimlessly.

Elena Beth, an interior design graduate student, elaborated on the structural design, saying, “It’s a hybrid of technology and old-school architecture.”

Sarah Moores also worked to improve the process of transitioning from one’s workday into home life. Her display featured a model of a wearable device that she developed. When users experience any heightened emotion, the device detects the change in physiological response and automatically starts recording. At the end of the day, users can relax in a listening pod that will play back the audio track of the day’s events. Moores hopes that this device will facilitate the reflection.

“The most important moments in our lives are the ones that are emotional,” she said. She went on to explain that this memory prosthetic will remind users of the importance of their emotional connections to events.

Taisha Tucker helped to usher in the age of the smart house with her work on adaptive living spaces. Tucker’s research capitalizes on the potential of synthetic biology to re-engineer bacteria into an interactive environment. She demonstrated this concept with a countertop display that showed how biologically embedded materials would indicate the presence of any contaminants in the food being prepared.

Similarly, the microbial flooring surface modeled how bacteria embedded in the material would detect and neutralize unwanted substances such as pet dander and dirt. By growing, extracting and then drying out a particular kind of mold, Tucker was able to create a tough brown material that can be used as a new type of wall covering. The display served as an example of the aesthetics of the material and also showed how bacteria in the wallpaper could react to the motions inside the room.

“I think it’s a wonderful example of how design and research can come together to create a better future for us,” Debra Ruben, director of the interior design program, said.

Katie McHugh added to the concept of a smart house with the introduction of the “smart bed” she designed. Much like Tucker’s adaptive living spaces, McHugh’s technology uses sensors to create an interactive sleeping environment.

“[The smart bed] speculates the onset of sensors in our materiality,” McHugh said.

She explained that different sensors could serve different purposes. For example, an audio sensor could register sleep talking and provide a gentle nudge to the sleep talker. Resistance sensors could signal the bed to redistribute the weight of a bedridden patient in order to prevent the formation of bedsores.

Kim Brown took her project in a different direction by working to enhance exploration of the urban landscape. “Deviant Wear” gives users an alternative way to interact with the surrounding environment rather than the screens of their handheld devices. Brown demonstrated this concept by providing a jacket and three scarves as a wearable interface. Each item had speakers embedded for audio output and heating and vibrating pieces to provide sensory cues for the wearer as to where to go.

Once the heating and vibrational stimulation have guided the user toward a wireless beacon, the audio plays through the neckline of the clothing and produces an interaction between the user and her surroundings. Through these and similar items, Brown said she hopes to encourage “ambulatory exploration of the urban landscape.”

Laura Nejman also wanted to add a new sensory dynamic to the way we interact. Her design proposed the use of emotional scent communication to provide a deeper but less intrusive means of messaging one another. Users would build a scent library and then transmit different combinations of scent selections to the receiving party. Nejman suggested that because scent is the sense most closely connected to emotion, her device offers the potential to “access the subconscious through emotion.”

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Drexel’s Good Idea Fund and Sport Management Student Union came together to host Ethan Zohn May 28 in the Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building. Through the course of his lecture, Zohn shared the life lessons he learned from his experience as a philanthropist, two-time cancer survivor and winner of the third season of “Survivor.”

Many of the attendees were fans of “Survivor” and were excited to see the man they had previously only seen on television and in magazines. Matthew Jolles, a sophomore entertainment and arts management major, was among the attendees, and expressed his desire to hear more about how Zohn “took a million dollars and turned it into the ultimate service project.”

The event began shortly after 7:30 p.m. Kevin Giordano, a junior sport management major and president of Drexel’s Sport Management Student Union, provided a brief biography of the speaker and overview of the night’s topic in his introductory speech.

Zohn discussed the idea that every individual can control the impact of adversity on his or her own life. After winning the million-dollar prize on “Survivor: Africa,” Zohn learned that he had developed a rare form of cancer. Despite the hardships of his diagnosis, Zohn found that cancer helped him refocus.

“It made me realize that there’s one absolute truth … that we’re all survivors on this earth for a very short time. It’s not about how or when we leave this world; it’s what we do to make the most of each day, in each crisis, while we’re here,” he said.

For Zohn, the glow of fame and fortune soon faded, and he found himself confronted with the realization that he would never feel fulfilled if he spent the money he won on himself.

He shared with the audience when he first felt the reward of giving back. Zohn had brought along a hacky sack while he was on “Survivor,” which was the only “luxury item” he was allowed. Although he said this memento served as his sole connection to his life back at home, he gave it to a Kenyan boy he met during the filming of the show.

“It wasn’t until I saw the happiness, the glee, in this little boy’s eyes that I could truly understand,” he said.

Zohn realized that he didn’t suffer from that act of sacrifice. “Once all my distractions were taken away from me, I was left with nothing more than the bare essentials of who I am. … All that you’re left with is your character, your values and the very essence of the human spirit.”

Zohn also introduced his “top four tips to survive.” He reinforced his first tip, to be unselfish, with an example from his experience on “Survivor” when he sacrificed a personal victory so that another could succeed. The second tip, be a leader, helped him not only in his time as a member of the Cape Cod Crusaders, a minor league soccer team, but also to win “Survivor.”

The third tip was to be a teacher. He told the audience a story about his own experience with cultural ignorance and how he managed to take the potentially offensive situation and turn it into a teachable moment. The fourth and final tip instructed audience members to be a member of the community. Zohn explained that he made himself key to his tribe’s survival on “Survivor,” which helped him to win his season without ever having a teammate vote against him.

At the age of 14, Zohn had one of his first encounters with misfortune when he lost his father to cancer. Zohn himself developed cancer twice and was treated through a series of stem cell treatments.

“There were times when I felt like my entire body had turned against me,” he said.

Rather than let himself be burdened by the circumstances, Zohn said he dug deep to find the character he needed to pull through.

Zohn turned the focus of the lecture to his work in Africa. He explained that at first glance, Zimbabwe is filled with natural beauty and a vibrant people. Beneath the surface, however, lies the poverty, overcrowding and the destruction left in the wake of AIDS. Zohn said he initially tried to hide from this uncomfortable truth but then decided to take a stand. He now runs a charity called Grassroots Soccer, which uses “the power of soccer to fight HIV and AIDS.” Soccer is a staple of African culture, so Zohn and his colleagues employ coaches and players to reach out to the communities and fight the taboo that is HIV and AIDS.

Zohn concluded with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort but where he stands in moments of challenge and controversy.” Zohn qualified this statement by saying that although challenges may seem more difficult than one can bear, they offer the tools one needs to survive. Zohn ended his talk by saying, “Figure out what makes your heart break, and then go out there and do something about it.”

The event was funded in full by The Good Idea Fund when a group of Sport Management Student Union officers presented their campaign to bring Zohn to Drexel’s campus.

“We pretty much felt that this gave a broad range of aspects for students to come in and join the event,” Andrea Shaw, coordinator of campus activities and adviser for The Good Idea Fund, said,

Giordano, who was responsible for reaching out to Zohn, commented after the lecture: “I thought it went well. He certainly got to everyone in one way or another. His message was clear in trying to inspire us and challenge us to give back to the community.”

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Drexel’s Southeast Asian student organizations hosted the second annual Southeast Asian Cultural Dinner May 18. This free event was held in Behrakis Grand Hall and featured a collection of cultural foods, music and performances. Although the majority of attendees were Drexel students, some students from other colleges also attended.

Joshua Robbins, president of Drexel’s International Student Union, emcee for the evening and a senior majoring in business and engineering, kicked off the event with a short introductory speech that announced the participating organizations: Drexel Thai Students Association, the Filipino Intercultural Society of Drexel University, the Vietnamese Students Association, the Indonesian Students Association, the Malaysian Students Association and the International Student Union.

Attendees were invited to visit booths set up by each organization. Volunteers from the six participating organizations served authentic, ethnic foods at stations displaying the national flag and information about the represented country. Perfecto Gallido, a member of FISDU and a junior biological sciences major, explained that he was serving pancit bihon, Filipino fried noodles, and lumpia, the FISDU’s version of egg rolls.

The INASA offered nasi goreng and beef rendang, and MSA provided dishes catered by the restaurant Banana Leaf. Ngoc “Lee” Duong, a VSA member and freshman majoring in economics and psychology, dished out summer rolls and sticky rice.

“We’re just here to promote our culture, bring out the Vietnamese student body and to have fun with everyone,” Duong said.

Zawir Onn, a member of MSA and sophomore chemical engineering major, shared similar sentiments.

“We’re just meeting up to meet new people and get the word out about Malaysian people,” Onn said.

The organizations’ stations featured other attractions as well. Chanakarn “Som” Horkaew, a member of DTSA and freshman majoring in nutritional sciences and foods, wrote out nametags in Thai, and Thant Mon Soe, a member of ISU and junior biomedical engineering, helped attendees try on a longyi, an item of traditional Myanmar clothing. Soe explained that the pleated wrap is called htamein for women and paso for men. Those who tried on the outfit were photographed and given a copy of the photo as a souvenir.

After visiting the booths, attendees returned to their tables to eat dinner while listening to a playlist of songs popular in each of the represented countries.

A variety of events followed dinner, including dances and video presentations. Members of INASA, costumed in grass skirts and feathered headbands, performed a sajojo dance. Members of FISDU followed with tinikling. This traditional Filipino dance form imitates the agile movements of the tikling bird. Performers wove through bamboo poles as the poles were repeatedly clapped together and apart. In the final moments of the dance, the performers maneuvered between crossed pairs of these bamboo traps while blindfolded.

Attendees were given the opportunity to win prizes during the dinner in a trivia game centered on Southeast Asian culture and in a free iPad giveaway sponsored by the new app Intreest.

Indra Senihardja, president of INASA and a junior business administration major, reflected on the preparation that led up to the event, praising its collaborative qualities.

The event shared the culture of countries involved in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations free-trade agreement. A member of the INASA said the agreement allows citizens of those nations to travel through the 10 member countries without a visa.

The event was brought to fruition when the six organizations came together to plan and set up.

Senihardja explained the unifying goal of the dinner, “The idea is, we want to know every culture; we want to enrich diversity in Drexel University. This is why we are here today.”

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Dario Salvucci discussed the advances made in modeling multitasking in the latest lecture in the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Lecture Series. The talk, titled “Walk, Text, and Chew Gum: A Computational Approach to Understanding Human Multitasking,” was presented May 14 in Mitchell Auditorium.

Salvucci, an alumnus of both Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon University, began the lecture by reviewing the various activities that fall under the banner of multitasking. He highlighted distracted driving as “the most salient and the most newsworthy these days.”

The audience was given an abridged version of multitasking theory. Salvucci focused on the concept of threaded cognition, an idea that he and other collaborators developed to describe and predict the effects of multitasking.

“The idea is that you have these threads of thought in your head that can be expressed computationally, and then you want to try and predict how these threads can interact with one another,” Salvucci explained.

Referencing Albert Einstein, Salvucci continued on to describe the brain as a “thought kitchen.” While the brain has a number of resources available, it is ultimately limited by the capacity of a central processor, just as a chef can only cook so many dishes at a time. The theory points to the basal ganglia of the brain as the limiting factor in our ability to multitask.

Salvucci and his colleagues aimed to understand more about the nature of this procedural pileup. They developed a model using a programming language with human flaws and capabilities. This model was incorporated into a driving scenario and used to measure the effect of distractions while driving. The driving model is a central feature in a device named “Distract-R,” which allows users to predict the degree of distraction caused by different tasks, such as tuning the radio or dialing a phone number.

Ford Motor Co. collaborated with Salvucci and his team to test the validity of the model. While it was difficult to express the effects of different multitasking activities quantitatively, the rank order of the interfaces of the tasks ended up being good for the test.

“We may not have the numbers exactly right, but we may be able to say that a certain way of using this radio is a lot more efficient than the different way,” Salvucci said. Considering the accuracy and convenience of the model, Salvucci hopes that it will one day reduce the amount of human testing. Taking human subjects off the road while testing potentially dangerous multitasking would not only save time and money but would also serve to make this line of research safer.

Now that there is a reliable model of distracted driving, researchers hope to expand this study to observe the effects of multiple distracted drivers with the use of variables such as traffic and commute time. Preliminary research shows that one distracted driver in a group of 20 cars can, in fact, produce a significant ripple effect. Salvucci went on to say that the future of driving is heading toward an age where vehicles will intake far more information than they do currently. For example, a driver may be able to communicate with adjacent vehicles or may receive a warning projected into his car from a red light. This upcoming influx of potential distractions poses both advantages and disadvantages for drivers, which can be evaluated by understanding the effects of multitasking.

Salvucci concluded his talk by explaining the societal implications of his research and the emerging debates on distracted driving. “This sort of underlying science and engineering is really important to give us more information to make these kinds of decisions.”

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