Professor of spatial computing Nick Giudice played a key role as a contributor to an award-winning paper about developing robot guide dogs to assist the visually impaired.
The paper 鈥 which is titled 鈥淭oward Robotic Companions: Understanding Handler-Guide Dog Interactions for Informed Guide Dog Robot Design鈥 and can be found 鈥 came from a study led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It won a Best Paper Award at CHI 2024: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the leading venue for human-computer interaction research. You can find the full UMass Amherst story .
While Giudice was not a primary investigator on this project, his combination of expertise and experience make him an ideal fit for this project.
鈥淚 have spent a lot of my career working on new tech for improving spatial awareness, navigation, and information access for blind and low vision people. I have also been a guide dog user for over 30 years,鈥 said Giudice. 鈥淭he combination of these personal and professional interests gives me a perspective on developing smart guiding technology that most people simply do not have.
鈥淭his lived experience provides me a lot of insight of what tech works and what doesn鈥檛 and what problems truly exist when navigating for blind folks 鈥 insight that is critical for designing solutions that avoid what I call the 鈥榚ngineering trap鈥 and creating tools that actually make a difference.鈥
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