Touch plays a vital role in maintaining human relationships through social andemotional communications. This research proposes a multi-modal haptic display capable of generating vibrotactile and thermal haptic signals individually and simultaneously. The main objective for creating this device is to explore the importance of touch in social communication, which is absent in traditional communication modes like a phone call or a video call. By studying how humans interpret haptically generated messages, this research aims to create a new communication channel for humans. This novel device will be worn on the user's forearm and has a broad scope of applications such as navigation, social interactions, notifications, health care, and education. The research methods include testing patterns in the vibro-thermal modality while noting its realizability and accuracy. Different patterns can be controlled and generated through an Android application connected to the proposed device via Bluetooth. Experimental results indicate that the patterns SINGLE TAP and HOLD/SQUEEZE were easily identifiable and more relatable to social interactions. In contrast, other patterns like UP-DOWN, DOWN-UP, LEFTRIGHT, LEFT-RIGHT, LEFT-DIAGONAL, and RIGHT-DIAGONAL were less identifiable and less relatable to social interactions. Finally, design modifications are required if complex social patterns are needed to be displayed on the forearm.

In this experiment, a haptic glove with vibratory motors on the fingertips was tested against the standard HTC Vive controller to see if the additional vibrations provided by the glove increased immersion in common gaming scenarios where haptic feedback is provided. Specifically, two scenarios were developed: an explosion scene containing a small and large explosion and a box interaction scene that allowed the participants to touch the box virtually with their hand. At the start of this project, it was hypothesized that the haptic glove would have a significant positive impact in at least one of these scenarios. Nine participants took place in the study and immersion was measured through a post-experiment questionnaire. Statistical analysis on the results showed that the haptic glove did have a significant impact on immersion in the box interaction scene, but not in the explosion scene. In the end, I conclude that since this haptic glove does not significantly increase immersion across all scenarios when compared to the standard Vive controller, it should not be used at a replacement in its current state.

Access to real-time situational information including the relative position and motion of surrounding objects is critical for safe and independent travel. Object or obstacle (OO) detection at a distance is primarily a task of the visual system due to the high resolution information the eyes are able to receive from afar. As a sensory organ in particular, the eyes have an unparalleled ability to adjust to varying degrees of light, color, and distance. Therefore, in the case of a non-visual traveler, someone who is blind or low vision, access to visual information is unattainable if it is positioned beyond the reach of the preferred mobility device or outside the path of travel. Although, the area of assistive technology in terms of electronic travel aids (ETA’s) has received considerable attention over the last two decades; surprisingly, the field has seen little work in the area focused on augmenting rather than replacing current non-visual travel techniques, methods, and tools. Consequently, this work describes the design of an intuitive tactile language and series of wearable tactile interfaces (the Haptic Chair, HaptWrap, and HapBack) to deliver real-time spatiotemporal data. The overall intuitiveness of the haptic mappings conveyed through the tactile interfaces are evaluated using a combination of absolute identification accuracy of a series of patterns and subjective feedback through post-experiment surveys. Two types of spatiotemporal representations are considered: static patterns representing object location at a single time instance, and dynamic patterns, added in the HaptWrap, which represent object movement over a time interval. Results support the viability of multi-dimensional haptics applied to the body to yield an intuitive understanding of dynamic interactions occurring around the navigator during travel. Lastly, it is important to point out that the guiding principle of this work centered on providing the navigator with spatial knowledge otherwise unattainable through current mobility techniques, methods, and tools, thus, providing the \emph{navigator} with the information necessary to make informed navigation decisions independently, at a distance.

Learning a new language can be very challenging. One significant aspect of learning a language is learning how to have fluent verbal and written conversations with other people in that language. However, it can be difficult to find other people available with whom to practice conversations. Additionally, total beginners may feel uncomfortable and self-conscious when speaking the language with others. In this paper, I present Hana, a chatbot application powered by deep learning for practicing open-domain verbal and written conversations in a variety of different languages. Hana uses a pre-trained medium-sized instance of Microsoft's DialoGPT in order to generate English responses to user input translated into English. Google Cloud Platform's Translation API is used to handle translation to and from the language selected by the user. The chatbot is presented in the form of a browser-based web application, allowing users to interact with the chatbot in both a verbal or text-based manner. Overall, the chatbot is capable of having interesting open-domain conversations with the user in languages supported by the Google Cloud Translation API, but response generation can be delayed by several seconds, and the conversations and their translations do not necessarily take into account linguistic and cultural nuances associated with a given language.

The burden of adaptation has been a major limiting factor in the adoption rates of new wearable assistive technologies. This burden has created a necessity for the exploration and combination of two key concepts in the development of upcoming wearables: anticipation and invisibility. The combination of these two topics has created the field of Anticipatory and Invisible Interfaces (AII)

In this dissertation, a novel framework is introduced for the development of anticipatory devices that augment the proprioceptive system in individuals with neurodegenerative disorders in a seamless way that scaffolds off of existing cognitive feedback models. The framework suggests three main categories of consideration in the development of devices which are anticipatory and invisible:

• Idiosyncratic Design: How do can a design encapsulate the unique characteristics of the individual in the design of assistive aids?

• Adaptation to Intrapersonal Variations: As individuals progress through the various stages of a disability
eurological disorder, how can the technology adapt thresholds for feedback over time to address these shifts in ability?

• Context Aware Invisibility: How can the mechanisms of interaction be modified in order to reduce cognitive load?

The concepts proposed in this framework can be generalized to a broad range of domains; however, there are two primary applications for this work: rehabilitation and assistive aids. In preliminary studies, the framework is applied in the areas of Parkinsonian freezing of gait anticipation and the anticipation of body non-compliance during rehabilitative exercise.

Humans have a great ability to recognize objects in different environments irrespective of their variations. However, the same does not apply to machine learning models which are unable to generalize to images of objects from different domains. The generalization of these models to new data is constrained by the domain gap. Many factors such as image background, image resolution, color, camera perspective and variations in the objects are responsible for the domain gap between the training data (source domain) and testing data (target domain). Domain adaptation algorithms aim to overcome the domain gap between the source and target domains and learn robust models that can perform well across both the domains.

This thesis provides solutions for the standard problem of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and the more generic problem of generalized domain adaptation (GDA). The contributions of this thesis are as follows. (1) Certain and Consistent Domain Adaptation model for closed-set unsupervised domain adaptation by aligning the features of the source and target domain using deep neural networks. (2) A multi-adversarial deep learning model for generalized domain adaptation. (3) A gating model that detects out-of-distribution samples for generalized domain adaptation.

The models were tested across multiple computer vision datasets for domain adaptation.

The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the proposed approaches and future directions for research in closed set and generalized domain adaptation.

In the last decade deep learning based models have revolutionized machine learning and computer vision applications. However, these models are data-hungry and training them is a time-consuming process. In addition, when deep neural networks are updated to augment their prediction space with new data, they run into the problem of catastrophic forgetting, where the model forgets previously learned knowledge as it overfits to the newly available data. Incremental learning algorithms enable deep neural networks to prevent catastrophic forgetting by retaining knowledge of previously observed data while also learning from newly available data.

This thesis presents three models for incremental learning; (i) Design of an algorithm for generative incremental learning using a pre-trained deep neural network classifier; (ii) Development of a hashing based clustering algorithm for efficient incremental learning; (iii) Design of a student-teacher coupled neural network to distill knowledge for incremental learning. The proposed algorithms were evaluated using popular vision datasets for classification tasks. The thesis concludes with a discussion about the feasibility of using these techniques to transfer information between networks and also for incremental learning applications.

Individuals with voice disorders experience challenges communicating daily. These challenges lead to a significant decrease in the quality of life for individuals with dysphonia. While voice amplification systems are often employed as a voice-assistive technology, individuals with voice disorders generally still experience difficulties being understood while using voice amplification systems. With the goal of developing systems that help improve the quality of life of individuals with dysphonia, this work outlines the landscape of voice-assistive technology, the inaccessibility of state-of-the-art voice-based technology and the need for the development of intelligibility improving voice-assistive technologies designed both with and for individuals with voice disorders. With the rise of voice-based technologies in society, in order for everyone to participate in the use of voice-based technologies individuals with voice disorders must be included in both the data that is used to train these systems and the design process. An important and necessary step towards the development of better voice assistive technology as well as more inclusive voice-based systems is the creation of a large, publicly available dataset of dysphonic speech. To this end, a web-based platform to crowdsource voice disorder speech was developed to create such a dataset. This dataset will be released so that it is freely and publicly available to stimulate research in the field of voice-assistive technologies. Future work includes building a robust intelligibility estimation model, as well as employing that model to measure, and therefore enhance, the intelligibility of a given utterance. The hope is that this model will lead to the development of voice-assistive technology using state-of-the-art machine learning models to help individuals with voice disorders be better understood.

Humans have an excellent ability to analyze and process information from multiple domains. They also possess the ability to apply the same decision-making process when the situation is familiar with their previous experience.

Inspired by human's ability to remember past experiences and apply the same when a similar situation occurs, the research community has attempted to augment memory with Neural Network to store the previously learned information. Together with this, the community has also developed mechanisms to perform domain-specific weight switching to handle multiple domains using a single model. Notably, the two research fields work independently, and the goal of this dissertation is to combine their capabilities.

This dissertation introduces a Neural Network module augmented with two external memories, one allowing the network to read and write the information and another to perform domain-specific weight switching. Two learning tasks are proposed in this work to investigate the model performance - solving mathematics operations sequence and action based on color sequence identification. A wide range of experiments with these two tasks verify the model's learning capabilities.

Over the past decade, advancements in neural networks have been instrumental in achieving remarkable breakthroughs in the field of computer vision. One of the applications is in creating assistive technology to improve the lives of visually impaired people by making the world around them more accessible. A lot of research in convolutional neural networks has led to human-level performance in different vision tasks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation and scene text recognition. All the before mentioned tasks, individually or in combination, have been used to create assistive technologies to improve accessibility for the blind.

This dissertation outlines various applications to improve accessibility and independence for visually impaired people during shopping by helping them identify products in retail stores. The dissertation includes the following contributions; (i) A dataset containing images of breakfast-cereal products and a classifier using a deep neural (ResNet) network; (ii) A dataset for training a text detection and scene-text recognition model; (iii) A model for text detection and scene-text recognition to identify product images using a user-controlled camera; (iv) A dataset of twenty thousand products with product information and related images that can be used to train and test a system designed to identify products.