Zheng Z.

🚦What happens when a driver needs to add a stop in Apple Maps, under pressure? As part of Anthony Andre, Ph.D., CPE (Tony) Usability Testing course with my teammates Wei-Hsiang Lo, Kate Vu, Kailin Cui, and Justin Catalano at SJSU, we evaluated Apple Maps using 4 user groups—a mix of experienced and inexperienced users, across low and high time-sensitive tasks (like finding a library vs. adding a stop mid-drive). 🚗 We conducted 12 sessions without verbal protocols to capture authentic behavior and uncover usability issues users didn’t even realize they were facing. 📊 What we found: •Users missed key route details and struggled to manage stops, especially under time pressure •Small interaction flaws created big safety risks in real driving situations •Inexperienced users relied on trial-and-error, leading to confusion and distraction 🛠️ What we gained: •Built and ran a complete usability test protocol •Designed realistic, scenario-based tasks for different user types •Logged and analyzed behavioral, performance, and perception data •Delivered real-world design recommendations focused on safety and usability This project reinforced that usability issues aren’t always visible until you observe users in action. #UXResearch #UsabilityTesting #HumanFactors #AppleMaps #UXDesign #UserExperience #SJSU

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Maker Faire is a kind of mini-Burning Man for the hobbyists of all kinds, however you can always meet some industrial people having fun over there. I met over there a director of NVidia, an EDA guy from Cadence, a researcher from Berkeley, EE students from UCs and teachers of technology for the school kids. So we at Verilog Meetup are going to put three tables with six computers over there and teach everybody the basics of the SystemVerilog hardware description language using FPGA boards with Gowin chips and graphical LCD screens. You can write something like “always_ff @ (posedge clk) if (x > counter) red <= ‘1;” and see the red moving over the screen. A very affordable way to find out what the hardware design is about - just ask Cliff Cummings, Doulos or Willamette HDL how much they charge for their SystemVerilog tutorials. If you already know SystemVerilog, we have another offering for you - a set of microarchitectural exercises to train yourself for the job interviews. These exercises are popular among both graduate students and EDA AI companies. Here is our booth https://lnkd.in/g4ZNmN_9 See you there!

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Bad press around autonomous driving is inevitable. Especially when a headline involves a child. Recently, Waymo faced intense scrutiny after one of its vehicles struck a child near a school. The child was thankfully only lightly injured, but the story spread fast, and the reaction was strong. As it should be. What’s getting less attention is the uncomfortable nuance. According to Waymo’s data, the system detected the child immediately, braked hard, and reduced speed significantly before impact. Their internal analysis suggests a typical human driver, even an attentive one, would likely have hit the child at a much higher speed given the same conditions. That does not make the incident acceptable. But it does challenge the way we frame these conversations. We tend to ask: “Did the autonomous system fail?” We rarely ask: “Compared to what baseline?” Human driving sets a very low bar. We just don’t notice it because human errors are normalized. The real question isn’t whether autonomous systems are perfect. They’re not. It’s whether they can consistently make fewer and less severe mistakes than humans, especially in chaotic, high-risk environments like school zones. Public scrutiny is necessary. Transparency is non-negotiable. But progress in safety often looks worse before it looks better, because machine mistakes are visible, logged, and headline-worthy in a way human mistakes never are. If we want safer streets, the comparison has to be honest.

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I was asked recently: what is one thing that has surprised me about leadership? Now, keep in mind I went to Stanford to be a great engineer, and I started at Intel in the engineering department. Engineering was where I lived. As I moved up within the organization, I had to start spending time with other areas of the business. Departments like marketing, business, legal, communications, etc. Guess which one I spent the most time in? Trick question -- it was the psychology department! A huge part of a leader’s job is seeking to understand and influence people. It's one of the most important skills in this role. I would never have believed this as an 18-year-old engineer! Some of the writings and efforts of Pat Lencioni, the The Table Group and the Five Dysfunctions of a team have been really helpful to me over the years to skill up in this area. 

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Lucid announced a landmark initiative with NVIDIA to accelerate the path to autonomous features for Lucid vehicles. Working together, our team will bring eyes-on, point-to-point driving (L2++) to Lucid Gravity later next year, and one of the first true eyes-off, hands-off, and mind-off (L4) consumer owned autonomous vehicle to future midsize vehicles leveraging NVIDIA’s multi-sensor suite architecture, including cameras, radar, and lidar. Read more about today’s announcement: https://ow.ly/bIeB30sQSrt

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The seventh episode of the Our Digital Life podcast series by IEEE SPS is titled “Audio Signal Processing in the Era of AI.” I’m joined by Felicia Lim, Staff Software Engineer at Google, to discuss the impact and opportunities that disruptive AI technologies bring to audio signal processing—and the critical role domain experts play in this process. https://lnkd.in/gV6QpTcq

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