KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Patrick Olivier
Culture Lab, Newcastle University
Talk: “Expressive Interactions”
Pen-based input is more than just 'natural' -- it has the potential to support 'expressive' input. In this talk I will describe some ongoing work at Culture Lab on expressive input, the use of sketches and drawings to interact with continuous multimodal data sets (dance data), and how this is best facilitated in a pen-based tabletop setting.
Biosketch
Patrick Olivier is a computer scientist with a long standing interest in multimodal systems. The focus of much of his work is on interaction with computers in everyday life and this inevitably spans a number of traditional fields in computer science from human-computer interaction and computer graphics, to artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Developing interaction technologies & techniques and observing & reflecting how people relate to digital technology is by its very nature an enterprise relying on insights as to people's work and play from many different perspectives. This inevitably involves collaborations with researchers from a wide range of disciplines including film makers, geographers, artists, engineers (mechanical, civil and electrical), neuroscientists, anthropologists, psychiatrists and clinicians. Currently he is undertaking this within Culture Lab, a new transdisciplinary research centre at Newcastle University. Patrick is a member of the School of Computing Science and the Informatics Research Institute at Newcastle University.
http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/p.l.olivier/
Deborah Tatar
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Talk: "Practice Into Theory: from serious work about learning in classroom environments to serious questions about the playful nature of control and coordination in computing."
The current talk reports on work that starts with a pressing social problem---the problem of maximizing equity and excellence in K-12 education---and one strategy for addressing this problem---the development of mobile, wirelessly connected tools to support classroom learning. It mentions the development and use in real classrooms of two suites of such tools (one for middle school math and one for 5-11 th grade science). The practice of using these wirelessly connected, mobile devices raised important theoretical issues about the nature of coordination and the computational support for coordination. We have been using Tuple Spaces (a framework for allocating work between parallel distributed actors) to build systems that explore the opportunistic control of the individual over their own actions, socially emergent negotiation of system goals and coordinative practices, and the relationship between content and coordination. These control structures and the contribution of the machine as compared to human participants are better described by analogy to playground games than to work situations. This analogy (along with the values it presupposes) is at variance with the object world of software engineers, which foregrounds the capabilities of the machine rather than the situation of use.
Biosketch
Deborah Tatar (Ph.D. Stanford, Psychology) is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Psychology at Virginia Tech. She has been a denizen of the halls of Harvard, M.I.T., Digital Equipment Corporation, Xerox PARC, Stanford, and SRI International at various times and in various capacities. She edited the proceedings of the first and second conferences on Computer Supported Collaborative Work and is currently convening the doctoral consortium for CHI2007. She sees handhelds and pen-based computing as simultaneously a pragmatic way to get computing devices where they belong---into the beautiful, greedy little hands of kids---and an exciting way to change our societies' narrow techno-centric relationship to devices.
http://people.cs.vt.edu/~dtatar |
