Brief Bio
Nicholas A. Giudice, III. Ph.D.
Dr. Nicholas Giudice received his Ph.D. in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences program in the Department of Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 2004 and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Psychological and Brain Sciences program in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2005-2008. He joined the University of Maine in Fall of 2008 and is currently a Professor of Spatial Computing in the School of Computing and Information Science, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. He is the founder and Chief Research Scientist of the Virtual Environments and Multimodal Interaction (VEMI) Laboratory (https://umaine.edu/vemi/). VEMI houses a large research facility combining a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) installation and a fully autonomous vehicle simulator in an integrated research and development student-driven environment. Giudice’s Research uses a combination of behavioral experiments and usability studies to investigate human spatial cognition with and without vision, to determine the optimal information requirements for the design of multimodal interfaces, and as a testbed for evaluation and usability research for information access technologies supporting navigation and autonomous transportation for blind and low-vision users, older adults experiencing vision loss, and sighted individuals who are ‘situationally blind’ (e.g., texting while walking). Dr. Giudice is himself congenitally blind and has a long history of both designing and using assistive technology for navigation. He has authored or co-authored over 150 scientific publications relating to the study and design of multimodal information access technology for blind and visually impaired people, collaborated on over $15 million in research grants in this field from NIH, NSF, and NIDILRR, and has advised over 100 students. Dr. Giudice has also been on the program committees (often as Chair / co-chair) of dozens of scientific conferences / workshops, is on the scientific advisory boards of two information-access companies (Aira Corp and Click and Go Wayfinding maps LLC), is a current board member on two blindness-related organizations (American Council of the Blind (ACB) of Maine and the Iris Network), and is the founder/co-founder of two start-up companies dealing with information-access technologies (Unizign Research, LLC and Unar Labs, LLC).