Interface Technology: Gesture Systems and Beyond
In 1963 Douglas Englebart invented the first mouse prototype. Unfortunately for him, the devices took so long to become widely used that he didn’t get the recognition he deserved and received no royalties for his contribution. Can you imagine using a computer without a mouse these days? Well, if you think about it, maybe you can - you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people that use touch-pads on laptops and desktops.
This is just the beginning of what is possible today. Better yet, the bright future in computer interfaces lies beyond touch; space-based gestures made possible with computer vision is a reality and will be featured in future operating systems. We’re seeing the beginning of this trend with the Microsoft Kinect, but if you think that all that can come from this is dancing in front of your computer to make the mouse cursor move, you might be surprised. This panel session will discuss current technologies in computer interfaces from touch tables to high-resolution visualization environments, and what is possible now in research environments.
Presenters
Alex Olwal (Ph.D.) is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. He has previously worked with the development of new technologies for Human-Computer Interaction at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), Columbia University (NY), UC Santa Barbara (CA) and Microsoft Research (WA).
Alex's research focuses on interaction techniques and technology, including augmented reality, spatially aware mobile devices, medical user interfaces, ubiquitous computing, touch-screens, as well as novel interaction devices and displays.
www.olwal.com
Brandt is a research engineer in the Visualization Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. At the vislab, Brandt has led the design and deployment of several interactive display systems, including the highest resolution display in the world, Stallion, and one of the world's largest touchscreen displays. Brandt is currently researching the role of gesture-based systems in the visualization of simulated and measured data.
Brandt has been a member of the University of Texas community since 2004. He has worked at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in the role of a systems engineer where he designed of a new control system for very large telescope systems. In addition, Brandt has worked at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. as a software engineer where he developed software to test and debug multi-core processors. Brandt is currently pursuing a graduate degree in computer engineering at the UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering.
Brandt's other research interests include immersive environments, distributed programming, and imaging sensor technologies.
Henry Holtzman is the MIT Media Lab's Chief Knowledge Officer, co-director of the Digital Life consortium, and director of the Information Ecology research group. In addition, Holtzman co directs the Lab's CE 2.0 initiative, a collaboration with more than 40 Media Lab sponsor companies to formulate the principles for a new generation of consumer electronics that are highly connected, seamlessly interoperable, situation-aware, and radically simple.
Holtzman's research explores ways to connect our physical environments with information resources through the use of low-cost, ubiquitous technologies. He has led research projects in the areas of tangible networking and image compression, resulting in desktop applications for RFID such as the Smart Mousepad, multicast network architectures for multimedia, IP television, scale-free image representation, and knowledge-based video representation. As a member of the MPEG standardization committee, he helped to define MPEG-2 video technology, used in DirecTV, DVD, digital cable, and digital TV broadcasting. Holtzman has been granted multiple patents for his inventions.
Holtzman has extensive experience with RFID, computer programming, hardware design, operating systems, and network architecture. He has worked with Codex, a subsidiary of Motorola Inc.; Apple Computer; Hearst New Media; and Art Technology Group. He was founder, CEO, and CTO of Presto Technologies, Inc., a Media Lab spinoff that introduced many novel uses for RFID to the market. He received his MS in media arts and sciences, and his BS in computer science, both from MIT.
Karla Vega is a research engineer in the visualization group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Currently, she manages the Visualization Interfaces and Applications group, which oversees the university's world-class visualization laboratory.
Karla's research interests include information and scientific visualization algorithms and applications, perceptual interfaces, collaboration and learning and modeling and simulation of water treatment processes. She received an M.S in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.S in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
Luis Francisco-Revilla is an assistant professor in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin.
He applies computer science to study and improve how different groups and individuals access, interact with, understand and use information in different contexts and situations. His span of research activities range from studying human activities, to creating robust theoretical frameworks, to designing and implementing novel systems that augment and transcend current work practices, to evaluating the systems and approaches using observational and experimental methodologies. Dr. Francisco-Revilla’s research interests include human-computer interaction (HCI), digital libraries (DL), hypertext (HT), and information retrieval (IR). His recent projects include work in the areas of the computational journalism, the future of TV, assistive technology, digital libraries, and adaptive spatial hypermedia. He is primary investigator in several international grants with total funding in the multi-million dollar range. He has over 30 publications in the top journals and international conferences in his field including: International Journal on Digital Libraries and ACM /IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). His professional service is extensive, having served as program co-chair for JCDL 2009, and as reviewer for top journals such as International Journal on Digital Libraries, Transactions on Information Systems, Transactions on the Web, and Journal of Digital Information. He has also served on multiple program committees for top international conferences such as JCDL, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), and ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT).
Sunday, March 11
