Garrett L. Weinberg

MERL Research / Technical Staff
Member Research Staff
B.A., Yale University, 2000

Phone: 617-621-7547
Email:

Garrett Weinberg originally joined MERL in July 2004 to develop a voice search prototype for mobile phones. He has focused since then on the design, implementation and evaluation of multimodal frameworks and interfaces, often (though not exclusively) for in-car navigation and multimedia devices.He has invented and prototyped several input and output techniques for reducing the cognitive load imposed by information systems, as well as reducing the time it takes to carry out retrieval tasks, for example finding a particular song from among tens of thousands of possibilities. In discussions with both Mitsubishi Electric colleagues and with our automotive OEM customers, he emphasizes the safety benefits of speech recognition systems that offer flexible command interpretation, robust handling of out-of-vocabulary search terms, and flat, simple dialog structures.

Before coming to MERL, Garrett designed and internationalized voice user interfaces at Dragon Systems, and was a chief architect and implementer of enterprise solutions for two Boston-area startups specializing, respectively, in media access control and financial portfolio management.

Publications:

Garay-Vega, L.; Pradhan, A.K.; Weinberg, G.L.; Schmidt-Nielsen, B.K.; Harsham, B.A.; Shen, Y.; Divekar, G.; Romoser, M.; Knodler, M.; Fisher, D.L., "Evaluation of Different Speech and Touch Interfaces to In-vehicle Music Retrieval Systems", Accident Analysis & Prevention, ISSN: 0001-4575, Vol. 42, Issue 3, May 2010 (Elsevier Ltd, TR2010-025)

Weinberg, G.L.; Harsham, B.A., "Developing a Low-Cost Driving Simulator for the Evaluation of In-Vehicle Technologies", International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI), ISBN: 978-1-60558-571-0, pp. 51-54, September 2009 (ACM Portal, TR2009-064)

Weinberg, G.L., "Contextual Push-to-Talk: A New Technique for Reducing Voice Dialog Duration", International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI), ISBN: 978-1-60558-281-8, Article 88, September 2009 (ACM Portal, TR2009-062)

Weinberg, G.; Kondili, D., "Display Style Considerations for In-Car Multimodal Music Search", IADIS International Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction (IHCI), July 2008 (IHCI 2008, TR2008-038)

*   Weinberg, G.; Raj, B.; Kalgaonkar, K., "Two New Techniques for Natural Spoken User Interfaces", ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), October 2006 (UIST 2006, TR2006-098)