Affiliate Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Juan Gilbert, Associate Chair of Research, CISE

Dr. Juan Gilbert is a new faculty member at the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Department at the University of Florida. He is the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and the Associate Chair of Research at CISE.  Dr. Gilbert has been at UF since July 1, 2014, and he’s also an affiliate faculty of the UFTI.

Dr. Gilbert’s research on Human Centered Computing (HCC) focuses on creating technologies that can relate to the human condition and how these technologies affect society. His lab goes by the name of the Human Experience Research Lab (HXRL), which produces societal impacts that are in use today.

“We build innovative solutions to real world problems by integrating people, technology, culture, policy, etc.,” explains Dr. Gilbert. “For example, we have developed the world’s most accessible voting system. It’s called Prime III. This technology is being used in elections and voting machine manufacturers are building next generation machines modeled after our technology. We are also building innovative user interfaces for the automobile for entertainment and information management.”

Which leads us to Dr. Gilbert’s affiliation with UFTI. Research at the HXRL lab, aligns very well with transportation engineering technologies. For example, he and his team work on automotive user interfaces and how distraction from these new technologies is increasingly becoming a problem due to these in-vehicles experiences. These new in-vehicles technologies have created new areas of research for his lab. Specifically, what he is currently working on is a voice user interface for vehicles.  The idea is to create a car that you can talk to.

“We are developing a conversational car,” Dr. Gilbert said. “Imagine being able to talk to your car to get information about the vehicle while you are driving?”

As for driver safety implications, Dr. Gilbert is conducting research on communicating with others while driving and wants to find out how drivers can communicate by using a completely hand-free, eyes-free short messaging application called Voiceing. Here’s a video that explains more on this concept: http://youtu.be/LNXYaCRGzVE.

“For example, texting while driving is very dangerous and should never be done,” Dr. Gilbert said. “However, people do it and cause accidents every day. What if you could communicate in a less distracting way?”

As a computer science engineer, Dr. Gilbert believes collaboration with transportation engineering is vital, especially as it relates to connected vehicles, an area the UFTI is focusing heavily on with the Florida Department of Transportation.

“As vehicles become more connected, hence the term ‘connected vehicle’, security and privacy will become a priority,” Dr. Gilbert said. “The connected vehicle also presents manufacturers and drivers with access to mountains of data. This will require data analytics to make this data useful for users.”

Dr. Gilbert is an accomplished scientist with accolades such as Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring from President Barack Obama, the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair at CISE and many, many more. In the end, what he feels most strongly about is working with his students.

“Being able to work with some exciting students that really care about the application of research to real-world issue is probably the biggest accomplishment for me,” Dr. Gilbert said.