Ted Selker
MIT Media Lab, USA
http://web.media.mit.edu/~selker/
Biography
Dr. Ted Selker is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media and Arts Technology Laboratory, and the Director of the Context Aware Computing Lab. Context aware computing strives to create a world in which peoples desires and intentions cause computers to help them. The lab is recognized for its work in creating environments that use sensors and artificial intelligence to create so-called “virtual sensors”; adaptive models of users to create keyboardless computer scenarios. Ted is director of Counter Intelligence a form discussing kitchens and domestic technology, lifestyles and supply changes as a result of technology. Ted is also known for his work on voting technology.
Prior to joining MIT faculty in November 1999, Ted was an IBM fellow and directed Directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research lab. He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachussets at Amherst and Brown Universities and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs.
Ted’s research has contributed to products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. His work takes the form of prototype concept products supported by cognitive science research. He is known for the design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device found in many notebook computers, and many other innovations at IBM. Ted’s new domestic technologies have been featured on Good morning America, food channel, ABC and Discovery channel and many radio interviews and in print forums.
Ted is work has resulted in award winning products, numerous patents, papers and is often featured by the press.
Abstract
The familiar and useful come from things we recognize. Many of our favorite things’ appearance communicate their use; they show the change in their value though patina. As technologists we are now poised to imagine a world where computing objects communicate with us in-situ; where we are. We use our looks, feelings, and actions to give the computer the experience it needs to work with us.
Keyboards and mice will not continue to dominate computer user interfaces. Keyboard input will be replaced in large measure by systems that know what we want and require less explicit communication. Sensors are gaining fidelity and ubiquity to record presence and actions; sensors will notice when we enter a space, sit down, lie down, pump iron, etc. Pervasive infrastructure is recording it.
This talk will present demonstrating examples in which our intentions can be understood and acted on by computers. Our work reaches across domains to demonstrate the principle of implicit communication as plausible control for systems can be competent. Examples in the home, office, car even bicycle will be presented.
Tom Rodden
University of Nottingham, UK
Biography
Tom Rodden is Professor of Interactive Systems at the Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL at the University of Nottingham. Prof. Rodden’s research interests are centred on howusers interact with and through computer systems. He has published iwdely in the areas of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ubiquitous Computing.
Since 2001 Prof. Rodden has been director of the Equator IRC that brings together 8 different research institutes in the UK. The Equator IRC is a six-year programme of research to explore new technologies that interweave the physical and digtal worlds. Equator is supported by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Abstract
Equator is an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) – a large scale, collaborative venture spanning eight partners and multiple disciplines including Computer Science, Electronics, Social Science, Psychology, Art and Design and Architecture and Planning. The goals of Equator are to create new devices and software platform to interweave the physical and digital worlds; to establish new methods for designing and evaluating these technologies; and to bring these technologies and methods together in a series of practical projects that directly engage users in the research process. The approach is defined by the following characteristics.
Adopting a balanced view of digital and the physical – Equator is not only concerned with how the digital can be accessed from or overlaid on the physical, but is also focused on how the physical appears to the digital.
Methods for understanding experience – Equator will combine expertise in established design methods, especially ethnography, with emerging methods from art and design and architecture and planning.
Engaging users – Equator will carry out a series of large-scale practical experiments that directly involve the public and user-organisations such as museums, performance groups, community support groups, schools.
Equator is structured around three long-term fundamental research challenges that combine with a series of practical user experience projects. The
research challenges explore long-term underlying technical and methodological issues. This talk will introduce the IRC and describe our experiences of building Ubiquitous computing in the real world.
Thomas Erickson
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA
http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/
Biography
Thomas Erickson is an interaction designer and researcher at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in New York, to whence he telecommutes from his home in Minneapolis. Prior to joining IBM Research in 1997, he spent nine years at Apple Research, five years at startup called Software Products International, and before that five years studying Cognitive Psychology at University California, San Diego.
Erickson’s current work involves studying and designing systems for supporting computer mediated communication and collaboration in groups and organizations; his principle aim is to create systems that can mesh with the social processes that govern our daily communication practices. His approach to systems design is shaped by methods developed in HCI, approaches to design drawn from architecture and urbanism, and theories and analytical approaches from rhetoric, sociology and anthropology.
Abstract
Humans are social creatures, and as such are exquisitely sensitive to the actions and interactions of their fellows. In face to face settings, the visibility of these actions and interactions and their residua serve as powerful means for shaping interaction and collaboration. However, in the digital realm, these cues are largely absent, and digitally mediated interaction often lacks the fluidity and grace that characterizes our day to day unmediated experience.
If Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future where we are surrounded by sensitive and responsive environments, we might ask what form this sensitivity takes, and what, exactly, is doing the responding? One view suggests that the locus of intelligence is in computational systems, and that such systems will be intelligent enough to serve us with the grace and forethought of highly competent and eternally motivated human servants. This talk explores an alternate view: that the intelligence in ambient intelligence will not reside so much in computational devices as in people, and that an important direction for inquiry involves investigating ways of designing digital environments that provide traction for the social processes that underlie human action and interaction.