and then read by the autofocus camera included on the iPhone, is one example of how technology already embedded in today’s devices simply needs to be adapted to focus on accessibility issues, such as by printing item-specific labels on household items like coffee cups, telephones, or even toothbrushes.

Meanwhile, robotics researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are developing assistive robots to help blind travelers. Starting with a humanoid robot called Baxter made by Rethink Robotics of Boston, the researchers modified Baxter to provide both physical and visual assistance at an information desk in a busy transit center when human workers are not available. The ultimate goal for the project is to integrate the robot with a smartphone navigation app and then, eventually, to introduce mobile robots that could physically guide blind people in a manner similar to guide dogs.

Pröll says for those dealing with disabilities, today’s largest hurdles are not simply technological, but are related to overcoming issues with interfaces. “We have all the technology in place that is needed to gather any signals you can imagine from the body,” he says. “Of course, I’m talking about brain-comput-er interface research and such, but generally, we can get so much data from any body movements, to eye movement and eye tracking. [But] it’s always an interfacing problem with existing applications.” Pröll contends for those with severe disabilities such as ALS, traditional input and control interfaces such as touchscreens and even voice commands are impossible to use, and require more sophisticated alternatives, such as eye tracking and brain-wave measurement.

Accessing Health

Kyle Rector, a graduate student at the
University of Washington, developed
a software application called Eyes-
Free Yoga to assist and guide blind
or sight impaired people into six yoga
positions, such as the Warrior I and
Tree positions. Eyes-Free Yoga uses
geometry to calculate the proper an-
gles needed to complete a yoga pose,
and then reads the person’s body po-
sitioning using the Kinect’s cameras
and skeletal-tracking technology. The
application compares the user’s body
vices, which led to the development of
a mobile app called HoverZoom. Hov-
erZoom is a finger-detection function
that significantly enlarges the area of
the keyboard under one’s finger to make
the underlying keyboard more readable
and easier to use. This enables people
who have issues with fine motor control,
such as Parkinson’s disease sufferers, to
more easily use the device since they do
not need to place their fingers directly
on a small surface to activate a key.

The app addresses a significant issue that likely will become more prevalent as the Baby Boomer generation moves into old age: fading or failing capabilities.

“We have a use-case where people are used to using a smartphone now, and don’t need glasses,” Pollmann says. “But in five years, they may need them in order to use the smartphone.”

Accessing Life

A key concern of both researchers and educators has been the focus on technology for entertainment or productivity, perhaps in lieu of focusing on tools that help people with daily tasks and activities. While the growing use of technology in game consoles has helped drive development of assistive technologies, some researchers believe not enough is being done to figure out how such technologies can be specifically adapted to help those with significant disabilities.

“When we see we already have technology like the Kinect, which we use for dancing games, it’s sad to see that no one is thinking about how we can put this technology to use for better reasons,” says Markus Pröll, founder of Xcessity Software Solutions, a Graz, Austria-based developer of human-computer interaction technologies.

Pröll and his team developed assistive technology using the Microsoft Kinect that allows severely disabled people to access a computer completely hands–free. By using the Kinect’s sensors to track a person’s head movements and facial expressions, the movement impaired can control the mouse-cursor and mouse buttons without using their extremities.

Other developers also are working on applications designed to address specific, real-world problems faced by those with disabilities. Digit-Eyes, an iOS application that creates QR code labels that can be affixed to everyday items

Milestones

2 Papers Share Dijkstra Prize

The E. W. Dijkstra Prize Committee granted the 2015

Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing jointly to two papers:

˲ Michael Ben-Or, “Another Advantage of Free Choice: Completely Asynchronous Agreement Protocols,” in Proceedings of the Second ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 27-30, August 1983. http://dl.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=806707

˲ Michael O. Rabin, “ Randomized Byzantine Generals,” in Proceedings of Twenty-Fourth IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pages 403-409, November

1983. http://bit.ly/1Hwxtdh
In these papers published
in close succession in 1983,
Ben-Or and Rabin started
the field of fault-tolerant
randomized distributed
algorithms, according to the
prize committee.

Ben-Or and Rabin were the first to use randomness to solve a problem, consensus in an asynchronous distributed system subject to failures, which had provably no deterministic solution. In other words, they were addressing a computability question and not a complexity one, and the answer was far from obvious.

Ben-Or and Rabin’s algorithms opened the way to a large body of work on randomized distributed algorithms in asynchronous systems, not only on consensus, but also on both theoretical problems, such as renaming, leader election, and snapshots, as well as applied topics, such as dynamic load balancing, work distribution, contention reduction, and coordination in concurrent data structures.

The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/ or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade. The prize includes an award of $2,000, sponsored jointly by the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC).