Speaker : Yasemin Vardar: webpage

Title: Digitizing Tactile Textures through a Perception-Driven Approach

Abstract: Imagine you could feel your pet’s fur on a Zoom call, the fabric of the clothes you are considering purchasing online, or tissues in medical images. We are all familiar with the impact of the digitization of audio and visual information in our daily lives, every time we take videos or pictures on our phones. Yet, there is no such equivalent for our sense of touch. This talk will encompass my scientific efforts in digitizing naturalistic tactile information over the last couple of years. I will explain the methodologies and interfaces we have been developing with my team and collaborators for capturing, encoding, and recreating the perceptually salient features of tactile textures for active bare-finger interactions. I will also discuss current challenges, future research paths, and potential applications in tactile digitization.

Bio: Yasemin Vardar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive Robotics at TU Delft (Netherlands), where she leads the Haptic Interface Technology Lab. She joined TU Delft as an Assistant Professor in 2020 and was recently promoted to her current position. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Stuttgart, Germany). She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Koç University (Turkey) in 2018. Her research focuses on understanding human touch and digitizing tactile information through advanced haptic interfaces. She has received several honors, including the ERC Starting Grant, NWO VENI Grant, and 2018 Eurohaptics Best PhD Thesis Award. She currently serves as Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics.