Juan E. Gilbert was recently named one of the 2008 Distinguished Diversity Researcher Awardees. He is a TSYS Distinguished Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department and a Center for Governmental Services Fellow at Auburn University.

Gilbert has been conducting research for a total of 10 years. His research is classified as Human Center Computing, where he tries to build innovative solutions to real world problems by integrating people, culture and technology to address societal issues. “We take the cultural aspects of people, who you are and what you do, and use that to build better solutions for you and address innovative solutions to real world problems," Gilbert said.

A quote by Gilbert found on his Web site says, "If you could build a system that resulted in world peace, but no one could use it ... it would be useless. Usability matters."

This rang true in his effort to develop "Prime III," a secure multimodal electronic voting system, which would allow voters with various abilities and disabilities to vote on the same machine using touch and/ or speech. Gilbert brainstormed this idea after the 2000 presidential election, what he calls a “major catastrophic failure by all accounts.” At a conference later, he heard a woman saying that electronic voting technology just couldn’t be done. Gilbert said he looked at his students and said, “We can fix this.” This became the birth of “Prime III.”

“Election science is as difficult if not more than rocket science because you deal with people as well as technology and all those moving parts,” added Gilbert.

Gilbert said he and his team had the expertise of dealing with people that technologists did not. He said technologists over-estimated their capacity to solve this with a technological intervention and that was just not the case. “You have to integrate people, technology and all the various aspects about election science to solve this problem, which is what we specialize in.” The goal was to develop a solution that was not only secure, but usable and accessible.

He has had the opportunity to present “Prime III” on Capitol Hill as part of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's Future of Voting Forum, and Congress has discussed his research in hearings on electronic voting. “Capitol Hill was exciting because it showed us that people acknowledged our work,” said Gilbert. “It was fun to sit in front of senators and tell them about our research and to be able to inform them of our solutions.”

Another of Gilbert’s diversity innovations is AADMLSS, which stands for African-American Distributed Multiple Learning Styles System. This brainchild formed after reflecting on a personal experience of his. While in his undergrad, Gilbert took an Economics class and failed the first test. He dropped the class and took it again the next semester with a different professor and passed with a good grade.

This jump started his thinking that the problem was not that he could not learn the material, but that it was the teacher’s instructional delivery just did not fit him. So he began to question, “What if you could change the instructional model? What if for every student you could have many instructors, who all could explain the same thing differently. You increase the chances of learning.”

Gilbert then implemented a system that tested that theory, and it showed outstanding results. Instead of the bell curve, most people received 80 percent or better. With that in mind, Gilbert said, “What if we could take that principle and start designing systems that taught things multiple ways, but also had things within it that integrated people’s culture and take that information and build instructional modules.”

He tested this with a group of kids in Chicago. They listened to rap music and played video games . Gilbert studied their culture and their neighborhoods and then built an interactive game-like environment that allowed them to play and learn algebra. “We did this and tested them, and kids that said they didn’t like math or couldn’t learn math, loved it," Gilbert said. “We found them walking around saying the lyrics.”

Gilbert is expanding that research to reach all kinds of people. He feels, “The premise is that it’s not that we can’t learn, it's that sometimes we aren’t explained things in a way that is conducive to start learning, and that’s what it’s about.”


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