Computers have left the desktop and have migrated into many parts of our lives. A particular promising and challenging example is that of computers in cars. They offer drivers important information and entertainment, but they also compete for drivers’ attention with potentially tragic consequences. Computers in cars can also support drivers as navigation aides, collision avoidance alerts, and even semi-autonomous vehicle automation. As in other instances of ubiquitous computing, computers in cars present the field of human-computer interaction with new challenges in developing technology and in understanding human behavior. This talk touches on three central challenges: avoiding driver distraction, sensing driver state, and harmonizing driver-automation interactions. Although different in the details, these same challenges face HCI as computers become more autonomous and migrate into multi-task, safety-critical domains.

John D. Lee is the Emerson Electric professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. Dr Lee’s research seeks to better integrate people and technology in complex systems, such as cars, semi-autonomous systems, and telemedicine. This involves developing models of human-technology interaction and interface designs that consider how technology mediates attention. He recently help to edit The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Engineering, the Handbook of Driving Simulation for Engineering, Medicine, and Psychology, and two books on distraction Driver Distraction: Theory, Effects, and Mitigation and Driver Distraction and Inattention.

Subsequent to the debacle of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, it became abundantly clear that America’s archaic voting system was in dire need of a major overhaul. Consequently, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines were purchased by several states. The use of these machines has not been without controversy with respect to security, trust and ease of use. Professors and security research teams have found several vulnerabilities in current voting technologies. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was created to provide all citizens equal access to participate in the electoral process, regardless of ability. The Prime III voting system, is a secure, multimodal electronic voting system that takes a universal design approach to address security, trust and ease of use. Dr. Gilbert and his research team were recently awarded a $4.5 million dollar grant from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to conduct research on accessible voting technologies.

Bio
Dr. Juan E. Gilbert is an IDEaS Professor and Chair of the Human-Centered Computing Division in the School of Computing at Clemson University where he leads the Human-Centered Computing Lab. He is also a Professor in the Automotive Engineering Department at Clemson University. Dr. Gilbert has research projects in spoken language systems, advanced learning technologies, usability and accessibility, Ethnocomputing (Culturally Relevant Computing) and databases/data mining. He has published more than 100 articles, given more than 160 talks and obtained more than $18 million dollars in research funding. He was recently named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement Science (AAAS), an ACM Distinguished Scientist and one of the 50 most important African-Americans in Technology. He was also named a Speech Technology Luminary by Speech Technology Magazine and a national role model by Minority Access Inc. Dr. Gilbert is also a National Associate of the National Research

When you perform real tasks like riding a bicycle or cooking a meal, you receive rich visual, auditory, and touch cues that enable you to carefully control your influence on the world around you. Technology now exists that can enable you to interact with environments that are outside of your immediate reach (the deep sea or a patient’s internal organs) or completely virtual (a computer game or the three-dimensional design for a new product). Unfortunately, these high-tech systems often don’t provide the same rich set of sensory stimuli that are available in the real world. Haptic (touch-based) feedback is a particularly exciting and under-utilized channel of communication that is poised to have a significant impact on everything from medical training to tablet computing, immersive gaming, and more. This presentation will provide a concise overview of haptic technology and then go into depth on three of the research projects currently underway in the Penn Haptics Lab: data-driven haptic virtual textures, naturalistic vibrotactile feedback for robotic surgery, and tactile cues for human motion guidance.

Bio
Katherine J. Kuchenbecker is the Skirkanich Assistant Professor of Innovation in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research centers on the design and control of haptic interfaces for applications such as robot-assisted surgery, medical simulation, stroke rehabilitation, and personal computing. She directs the Penn Haptics Group, which is part of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. She has won several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER Award in 2009, Best Hands-On Demonstration at the 2009 IEEE World Haptics Conference, and inclusion in the Popular Science Brilliant 10 in 2010. Dr. Kuchenbecker serves on the program committee for the IEEE Haptics Symposium, and she is an Associate Editor for the IEEE World Haptics Conference and the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Prior to becoming a professor, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, and she earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2006.

Design guidelines and tools exist for making web sites accessible for people with disabilities, but a majority of corporate and government web sites continue to be inaccessible. For the U.S. Federal government, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires that all web sites be accessible, however, a majority of Federal web sites are not in compliance, and site accessibility statements often provide little information. This presentation will provide information on recent research and recent policy activity related to web accessibility. Some recent research findings include studies of human interaction proofs, link structures, and web-based e-mail applications for blind users, and web browsing for expert users with Down syndrome. Some recent policy activities include the July memo from the Office of Management and Budget on Section 508 enforcement, the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking from the Justice Department on the accessibility of web information provided by entities covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the administrative complaint filed against Penn State University due to inaccessible campus technology.

Bio
Dr. Jonathan Lazar is a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University. He is the founder and director of the Universal Usability Laboratory at Towson University, and currently serves as director of the undergraduate program in Information Systems. He is interested in research issues related to user-centered design processes, web usability, web accessibility for people with disabilities, and public policy in HCI. Dr. Lazar is co-author of the book “Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction” (Wiley, 2010), editorof the book “Universal Usability” (Wiley, 2007) and author of “Web Usability: A User-Centered Design Approach” (Addison-Wesley, 2006). Dr. Lazar is the ACM SIGCHI Chair of Public Policy, and he serves on the editorial boards of Universal Access in the Information Society, Interacting with Computers, and ACM Interactions Magazine. Dr. Lazar was named a winner of the 2010 Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award from the National Federation of the Blind, and was named the 2009 Outstanding Faculty Member in the College of Science and Mathematics at Towson University.

Ana-Paula Correia, Assistant Professor in the Center for Technology Learning and Teaching and Human Computer Interaction, will present “Designing Learning Experiences for Global Virtual Teams.” She will present findings from her research on collaborative learning in the context of global virtual teams. Opportunities, challenges, design tensions and lessons learned will be discussed.

Heike Hofmann, Associate Professor in Statistics and Human Computer Interaction, will present “How good is your eyeballing? – Measuring Statistical Graphics.” Her graduate student, David Rockoff, will join her in the presentation. Abstract: Visual perception and cognition are key factors to take into account when evaluating the effectiveness of statistical graphics. William S. Cleveland and Robert McGill, in their seminal 1985 paper, defined the elementary graphical-perception tasks and ranked them in order of importance. There is a need for more in-depth research into how different visual elements affect perception and cognition. The “eyeballing” is an online game that measures a player’s accuracy on a variety of geometric tasks. We will present data on players’ results and rank task difficulties.

Debra Satterfield, Associate Professor in Art and Design and Human Computer Interaction, will present “Design for Behavioral Change and Design for Social Inclusion. Abstract: Design for Behavioral Change is design that helps model or direct positive changes in the behaviors and attitudes of the target audiences and constituent groups to their mutual benefit and the betterment of society. Design for Social Inclusion is design that breaks down social barriers and allows target audiences and constituent groups to meet and interact as full partners in their encounters. It considers the social, emotional, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral aspects of mediated experiences. Specifically, this research is focused on the design of educational experiences for children with cognitive disabilities and on medical experience design.

Julie Dickerson, Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Human Computer Interaction, will present “Visualizing and Understanding Biological Data.” Abstract: The study of biological organisms has gone from studies of one or two genes and their functions at a time to studies of entire genomes (20-30 thousand genes) at a time over the last ten years. This has created tremendous problems for the interpretation of the data and putting it into a biological context. MetNetGE shows some novel visualizations for looking at changes over the entire organism.

“For many children (ages 2-12) in the United States, mobile technologies are now an integral part of their everyday living and play experiences. They commonly use mobile phones, netbooks, pen-based computing, GPSs, computer-enhanced toys and much more. But this is not the case for all children. There are still young people who live in places where mobile technologies are just becoming affordable. Others live in areas where there is no cell phone service at all. And still other children live in places where basic living necessities outweigh the need for electronic technologies. There are extreme differences in children’s opportunities and challenges for learning with new technologies. Therefore, in my talk I will discuss how to approach designing for these diverse children. This talk is not about how to make mobile technologies. It is about how to make BETTER mobile technologies for the world’s children. I will demonstrate some of our newest work at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab in mobile collaboration and intergenerational mobile storytelling. I will also suggest how these new mobile technologies call for new approaches to design.”

“Skills of emotional intelligence include the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to another person’s emotion, and the ability to know when (not) to display emotion. This talk will demonstrate advances at MIT aimed at giving several of these skills to technology including mobile devices, robots, agents, wearable and traditional computers. I will present live demonstrations of current technology, including a system developed with Kaliouby to recognize cognitive-affective states in realtime from a person’s head and facial movements. This technology computes probabilities that a person looks like he or she is concentrating,interested, agreeing, disagreeing, confused, or thinking. These states signal important information such as when is a good time to interrupt, or when might be appropriate to apologize for interrupting. A wearable version of this system is being developed for helping people who face challenges in reading real-time social-emotional cues. I will describe several other new affective technologies that facilitate emotion measurement and communication, and describe applications in autism.”

Professor Klatzky received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Stanford University. Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, she was a member of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Klatzky’s research interests are in human perception and cognition, with special emphasis on spatial cognition and haptic perception. She has done extensive research on human haptic and visual object recognition, navigation under visual and nonvisual guidance, and perceptually guided action. Her work has application to navigation aids for the blind, haptic interfaces, exploratory robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments. She is the author of over 200 articles and chapters, and has authored or edited 6 books.

Michael Schrage is one of the world’s “most innovative thought leaders on innovation.”

He has redefined how we think about innovation by focusing on customer acceptance of new products and services as an integral part of the innovation process. Also, he has pioneered techniques for using rapid prototyping, simulations and modeling to improve return in innovation investments.

Schrage’s excellence in these fields has led him to become a widely published columnist, a consultant for the United States government, and a groundbreaking author of two critically acclaimed books:

• Serious Play – How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate
• Shared Minds – The New Technologies of Collaboration

Schrage has used his knowledge of how to maximize return on investment from innovation processes to help businesses spend the iterative capital wisely that they have made from mastering the technologies he authored in Serious Play.

Don Norman lives two lives: theory and applications. As a cognitive scientist, he studies, teaches, and writes about the relationship between technology and people. In his applied life, he helps companies make products that appeal to the emotions as well as to reason.

Business Week calls him a “cantankerous visionary, cantankerous in his quest for excellence”. Upside Magazine named him one of the “Elite 100” for 1999. Dr. Norman brings a unique mix of the social sciences and engineering to bear on everyday products. Although he is a strong advocate of human-centered design and simplicity and perhaps best known for his book, The Design of Everyday Things, he now wants to ensure that products appeal to the emotions as well as to reason.

Dr. Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, an executive consulting firm that helps companies produce human-centered products and services. Norman serves as advisor and board member to numerous companies and non-profit organizations in the area of policy and education. Among others, he serves on the editorial advisory board of Encyclopedia Britannica and on the board of overseers of Chicago’s Institute of Design.

Norman has also been Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer and an executive at both Hewlett Packard and UNext (a distance education company).

Guy Kawasaki’s presentation will inspire entrepreneurial thinking in any organization. Referring to his most recent book, Art of the Start, he says that it it “builds upon my experience as an evangelist, entrepreneur and most recently, as a venture capitalist” and “gets down to the real-world tactics of pitching, positioning, branding, recruiting, bootstrapping, and rainmaking.” (source: GuyKawasaki.com)

Bio
Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and author of eight books about business. He is also ranked as one of the top 100 bloggers in the world. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. where he was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer.

Neal Stephenson is the author of the bestselling Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) as well as the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Raghu Ramakrishnan is VP and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he heads the Community Systems group. He is on leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Professor of Computer Sciences, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities such as Yahoo! Answers, and provided collaborative customer support for several companies, including Compaq and Sun. His research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on data retrieval, analysis, and mining. He has developed scalable algorithms for clustering, decision-tree construction, and itemset counting, and was among the first to investigate mining of continuously evolving, stream data. His work on query optimization and deductive databases has found its way into several commercial database systems, and his work on extending SQL to deal with queries over sequences has influenced the design of window functions in SQL:1999.

Dr. Ramakrishnan was elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2001, and has received several awards, including a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering , an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, Faculty awards from IBM, Microsoft and Xerox, and an ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.  He is Chair of ACM SIGMOD (Management of Data) , on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment and the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) , an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems , recently served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.

Ray Kurzweil successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. His web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.

In 2002, Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation, in addition to scores of other national and international awards. He has also written several successful books, including the recently released The Singularity is Near.

“Ray Kurzweil’s full biography”

The old computing was about what computers could do;
the new computing is about what people can do.

To accelerate the shift from the old to the new computing designers need to:

1) reduce computer user frustration. Recent studies show 46% of time is lost to crashes, confusing instructions, navigation problems, etc. Public pressure for change could promote design improvements and increase reliability, thereby dramatically enhancing user experiences.

2) promote universal usability. Interfaces must be tailorable to a wide range of hardware, software, and networks, and users. When broad services such as voting, healthcare, and education are envisioned, the challenge to designers is substantial.

3) envision a future in which human needs more directly shape technology evolution. Four circles of human relationships and four human activities map out the human needs for mobility, ubiquity, creativity, and community. The World Wide Med and million-person communities will be accessible through desktop, palmtop and fingertip devices to support e-learning, e-business, e-healthcare, and e-government.

Leonardo da Vinci could help as an inspirational muse for the new computing. His example could push designers to improve quality through scientific study and more elegant visual design. Leonardo’s example can guide us to the new computing, which emphasizes empowerment, creativity, and collaboration. Information visualization and personal photo interfaces will be shown: PhotoMesa (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photomesa) and PhotoFinder (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photolib).

Winner of IEEE book award for “Distinguished Literary Contribution
furthering Public Understanding of the Profession”

For more:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/newcomputing

BEN SHNEIDERMAN is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and Member of the Institutes for Advanced Computer Studies & for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM ) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
 
Ben is the author of “Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems” (1980) and “Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction” (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . With S Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored “Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think” (1999). “Leonardo’s Laptop” (MIT Press) appeared in October 2002, and his new book with B. Bederson, “The Craft of Information Visualization” was published in April 2003.

What will it take for virtual reality to move outdoors and finally see the light of day?

Professor Steven Feiner of Columbia University will discuss why virtual reality, especially in the form of augmented reality, and mobile computing are a synergistic combination. He will also provide an overview of the research problems that must be addressed before mobile augmented reality systems can play a major role in our future.