Professor Hong Z. Tan has received a research contract from Facebook on tactile communication of speech. This one-year project will support Professor Tan’s research on haptic interfaces and includes subcontracts to MIT and Sensimetrics. The research will support Facebook’s initiatives in developing haptic communication systems. With this contract, Purdue joins the growing number of universities who have signed Sponsored Academic Research Agreement with Facebook’s Building 8 group headed by Regina Dugan.

Professor Tan has been a member of the ECE faculty since August 1998 and leads the Haptic Interface Research Laboratory. She holds courtesy appointments in the School of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue. Prior to joining Purdue, she was a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. She has held visiting positions at Oxford University, Stanford University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Microsoft Research Asia, and Beijing Normal University. Her doctoral research at MIT focused on the development of a multi-finger Tactutor^TM system for speech communication by deaf-and-blind individuals using an information-theoretical framework for assessing human performance. This research contract will leverage Professor Tan’s experience in sensory communication and haptic interface design. She is especially excited about Facebook’s vision to enable multisensory communication for people with all levels of sensorimotor capabilities.

Recently elected to Fellow of the IEEE for “contributions to wearable haptics,” Professor Tan is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the Chinese National Natural Science Funds’ Distinguished Overseas Young Scholar Award. She is dedicated to establishing and growing the international haptics research community by serving on conference committees, founding the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics, co-chairing haptics conferences and serving as the editor-in-chief of World Haptics Conferences. She is passionate about expanding the impact of her work through consulting and startup activities.