Segal Seminar Series: Merrie Morris, University of Washington
Combining Human and Machine Intelligence to Describe Images to People with Visual Impairments
Digital imagery pervades modern life. More than a billion images per day are produced and uploaded to social media sites, and we also encounter digital images within websites, apps, digital documents, and eBooks. Engaging with digital imagery is part of the fabric of participation in contemporary society, including education, the professions, e-commerce, civic participation , entertainment, and social interactions. However, most digital images remain inaccessible to the 39 million people worldwide who are blind. By some estimates, nearly half of online images lack any alternative text descriptions that can be read aloud by screen reader software, and many images that do contain alt text have captions that are of poor quality; many popular emerging formats like social media and mobile apps do not even offer content authors the ability to specify caption information. Emerging AI techniques, such as vision-to-language systems, offer a cheap, scalable means of labeling digital images; however, these technologies have a long way to go before they can be a reliable information source for people who are visually impaired. To help supplement, correct, and train AI captioning systems, human-in-the-loop techniques such as crowdsourcing and friendsourcing can play an important role in advancing caption coverage and quality. In this talk, I will discuss the trade-offs of various image-description techniques, and present example hybrid intelligence systems for making digital imagery accessible to screen reader users.
Bio:
Meredith Ringel Morris is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research; she is also an affiliate Professor at the University of Washington in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and in the Information School. Dr. Morris leads MSR’s Ability team, which conducts research in HCI and AI with the goal of developing innovative technologies that extend the capabilities of and enhance quality of life for people with disabilities. She is an internationally-recognized expert in Human-Computer Interaction, and has conducted foundational research in several areas including gesture design, social search, and accessibility. She has served as the general chair for ACM’s CSCW conference, and has previously served as Technical Program Chair of the CHI, CSCW, ASSETS, and Interactive Tabletops & Surfaces conferences. Dr. Morris is a member of the TOCHI editorial board, and is a past member of the CSCW and CHI steering committees. She has been recognized as one of Technology Review’s “35 under 35” for her work on collaborative web search, and was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist for her contributions to HCI research. She is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles, many of which have been recognized with best paper awards; her publications are available at http://aka.ms/merrie. Dr. Morris earned her Sc.B. in computer science from Brown University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University.