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CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Richard Steele


Tolfa Corporation Lingraphica
Communication Using Iconic Graphics
June 5, 1991

Human Computer Interaction is increasingly engaged with the social-cultural context that people live in everyday. The city, in all its grit and glory, provides a complex and rich context in which to understand the challenges technologies face when they are adopted by people in the real world. In this presentation, I discuss three on-going research initiatives from my group at Cornell Tech in New York City which grapple with interaction in the urban context: Trashbots in the City, Urban Fingerprinting, and Communal eXtended Reality. These projects highlight different aspects of urban interaction--culture, scale, engagement--which demand new approaches from researchers and practitioners in HCI. In this talk, I will also champion the perspectives that HCI brings to the already crowded urban landscape.

<P>Richard D. Steele, Ph.D., is senior scientist in communication at the Tolfa Corporation, a Palo Alto based start-up company working to bring technology- based devices to market to assist persons with disabilities. He graduated with distinction in Physics from Stanford University in 1964, and received graduate degrees from Harvard University in Slavic languages and linguistics (M.A. 1966, Ph.D. 1973). After teaching for 12 years at academic institutions, including Cornell University and Grinnell College, he worked for 8 years as a Research Health Scientist at the VA-Stanford Rehabilitation Research and Development Center in Palo Alto. During this time, he was principal investigator on a project aimed at developing a computer-based, graphically oriented alternative communication system for persons with severe aphasia. His presentation draws on over six years of research, development, and clinical evaluation by a multidisciplinary team of linguists, neurologists, speech pathologists, interface specialists, programmers, and others.</P>