HCIL Seminar Series

Speakers
Jim Gemmell
Ravin Balakrishnan

HCIL Seminar Series - Spring 2005

The purpose of the seminars is to help promote interdisciplinary discussion on topics relating to Human-Computer Interaction while facilitating communication between members of the HCI community. There will be talks throughout the Fall.

These lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are needed.

For questions or comments, contact HCIL information at hcil-info@cs.umd.edu.

February 9, 2005

Wednesday, 2:00pm, A.V. Williams Building 3258


		Danyel Fisher Researcher
	Company:	Microsoft
	URL:	http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/
Visualizing Social and Temporal Structures in Email: Recent Work in SOYLENT and SNARF Abstract Email has become a “habitat”, a place where we not only communicate, but manage our tasks and personal information. Indeed, in many ways, email logs are a record of a user’s social interaction patterns. We can use these logs to begin to understand the social structure of our interactions, and then to present new interfaces to both email itself, and to the rest of the computer system, that are more responsive to these social structures. In this talk, I present two different approaches to this information. The Soylent project, part of my dissertation work at UC Irvine, examines social networks and the temporal shifts within email, and uses them as a way of connecting different forms of interaction. The Snarf project, at Microsoft Research, is more narrowly focused on the email triage task. Snarf exposes some of the most important attributes of recent email in order to place it within a context so that the reader can quickly choose and review it. Biography Danyel Fisher is a researcher in the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. His research focuses on visualizing the interactions between groups of people, and exploring their social and structural roles. His research has looked at visualizations of interactions within email, and examining the structural roles of interaction within Usenet newsgroups. He recently completed his PhD in Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, and received his MS from UC Berkeley.

February 15, 2005

Tuesday, 2:00pm, A.V. Williams Building 3258


		Jim Gemmell Researcher
	Company:	Microsoft
	URL:	http://research.microsoft.com/~JGemmell/
MyLifeBits Abstract MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. MyLifeBits is both an experiment in lifetime storage and a software research effort. As an experiment, Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio. In this talk, we will demonstrate the software we have developed for MyLifeBits, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output. www.mylifebits.com has more information. One of the demos will be based on the summer intern project of Aleks Aris from UMd. Biography Jim Gemmell is a researcher in the Microsoft Research Media Presence Group at the Bay Area Research Center (BARC) in San Francisco. His current research focus is on personal lifetime storage, as architect of the MyLifeBits project and chair of the First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experience (CARPE). Dr. Gemmell received his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University and his M. Math from the University of Waterloo. His research interests include personal media management, telepresence, and reliable multicast. He produced the on-line version of the ACM 97 conference and is a co-author of the PGM reliable multicast RFC. Dr. Gemmell serves on the editorial advisory board of Computer Communications.

March 15, 2005

Tuesday, 2:00pm, A.V. Williams Building 3258


		Ravin Balakrishnan Assistant Professor
	School:	Department of Computer Science University of Toronto
	URL:	http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ravin/
Interaction and Visualization Techniques for Next-Generation Displays Abstract Our computing environments are rapidly diversifying beyond personal space technologies like desktops, laptops, and PDAs to include shared, more public, displays of much larger sizes and capabilities. These include true 3D displays, tabletop and wall size displays, and in fact any surface onto which an image can be projected. In this talk, I will argue that if we are to effectively utilize such a diverse display environment, we must develop user interfaces that leverage the unique properties of each display. In other words, the de facto "solution" of taking the standard GUI operated with a keyboard and pointing device and sticking it on these new form factors is not likely to work any better than attempts at using reins to drive early "horseless carriages" did in the 1800's. I will discuss some of the challenges of designing interfaces for these environments, and present some research currently being developed in my lab that are beginning to address them. These include using rich gestural input and context sensing to enable more fluid interactions, as well as new visualization techniques for presenting information in a manner that is appropriate for each display. Through these examples, I hope to illustrate the vast potential for innovation in this fertile area of human-computer interaction, and to challenge and inspire others to work on addressing the many challenges that remain. Biography Ravin Balakrishnan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) laboratory (www.dgp.toronto.edu). He is also a member of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) (www.kmdi.toronto.edu). His research interests are in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interactive Computer Graphics, with a current focus on innovative interaction techniques, interfaces for next generation displays, information visualization, sketching interfaces, ambient and pervasive computing, and empirical evaluation of user interfaces including associated metrics and predictive models of human performance. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, while concurrently working part-time as a researcher at Alias from 1997-2001. He currently holds the Bell University Laboratories Assistant Professorship in HCI at the University of Toronto, and is the recipient of a Premier's Research Excellence Award. Further information, including publications and videos demonstrating some of his research, can be obtained from www.dgp.toronto.edu/~ravin

May 2, 2005

Monday, 2:00pm, A.V. Williams Building 1152


		Yvonne Rogers Professor
	School:	Library and Information Science/Cognitive Science Indiana University
	URL:	http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/yrogers/
Grown-Up Science: Enabling Students to Learn How to Become Scientists Through Using Pervasive Technologies Abstract Geologists, biologists, climatologists, seismologists and other scientists nowadays use a diversity of sensing devices and measuring instruments to record aspects of the earth, in order to investigate, predict and reason about a particular aspect of the environment. A major part of their research involves mapping, matching and noticing patterns and anomalies from the masses of datasets that they collect over time. However, it is very difficult to become competent at accomplishing these forms of analyses. Local and global connections have to be continuously made when moving between the physical and digital worlds. How might we help students (and scientists) learn how to do this kind of complex interlinking and high-level reasoning? In my talk, I will describe an ongoing project I am involved in at Indiana University where a team of computer scientists, interaction designers and environmental scientists are developing networked mobile recording/measuring/communication tools, intended to be used by groups of students when out in the field. The tools have been designed to enable easy access, updating and comparison of a variety of contextually-relevant datasets, visualizations and information when measuring and sensing aspects of the environment. An underlying assumption is that by juxtaposing the activities of measuring and analysis in this way, students can begin to learn the art of grown-up science more effectively. To support this claim, I will present findings from a preliminary field study where groups of students used our tool to measure, hypothesize and analyze about how and why a wetland restoration site was changing over time. Biography Yvonne Rogers joined Indiana University in the fall of 2003 as a professor in the schools of Library and Information Science and Informatics. She is also an adjunct professor of Cognitive Science. She was a professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the former School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences (now the Department of Informatics) at Sussex University, UK, where she co-founded the Interact Lab, an internationally known interdisciplinary research center concerned with possible interactions between people, technologies and representations. She has also been an an assistant professor at the Open University (UK), a senior researcher at Alcatel telecommunications company, a visiting scholar at UCSD, and a visiting professor at Stanford University, Apple Research Labs, and the University of Queensland. She is internationally known for her work in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Interactive Learning Environments. Her research focuses on augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities with interactive technologies that move "beyond the desktop." This involves designing enhanced user experiences through appropriating and assembling a diversity of technologies including mobile, wireless, handheld and pervasive computing. A main focus is not the technology per se but the design and integration of the digital representations that are presented via them to support social and cognitive activities in ways that extend our current capabilities.