Stephanie Ludi - Featured Faculty 2011
Stephanie Ludi
Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences
Creating useful systems for visually-impaired students.
STEPHANIE LUDI IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SOFT- WARE ENGINEERING. HER RESEARCH INCLUDES SOFTWARE ENGINEERING EDU- CATION, REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING, TESTING AND HCI WITH A FOCUS ON DESIGN, EVALUATION AND ACCESSIBILITY.
Dr. Ludi leads the AccessLecture project, developing and testing a portable system that provides visually impaired students, at the secondary school and university level, with greater access to science and math material in and out of the classroom. The project utilizes commercially available hardware to provide a system where low vision students can view lecture material that is being written on the whiteboard at the appropriate level of zoom and contrast. The system is iPad-based and it will enable students to also take notes during the lecture and to access the lecture and notes after class. The written/drawn lecture material is captured wirelessly by sensors in the whiteboard marker and eraser sleeves. The use of the stroke-based capture eliminates the issues with glare, room lighting, instructor position, and other obstacles that exist with a camera-based approach. This research will advance knowledge in accessible multitouch user interface design and user interface design for low vision users. The project intends to increase access to math/science lecture material by low vision students. The low cost of the hardware will also enable the use of AccessLecture by students on a large scale. The project brings together students, parents and educators from various socio-economic backgrounds in order to make the project as widely usable as possible to diverse students at the national level.
Dr. Ludi also leads Project ACE (Accessible Computing Education) and CS4ALL (Computer Science for All) which are both funded by the National Science Foundation. Project ACE includes workshops for middle and high school students who are visually impaired that teaches them programming concepts through Lego Mindstorm Programming. The tutorials and activities have been developed by Dr. Ludi, Prof. Tom Reichlmayr and students in Software Engineering and Computer Science. The CS4All project is a multi-institutional project that will use robotics and other programming platforms in a universally accessible set of tools and curriculum for pre-college students, including those with disabilities.