Sensible Computers: Technologies that Enable Computers to Understand Human Emotion

Ted Selker, MIT Media Lab
selker@media.mit.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University November 3, 2000

The familiar and useful come from things we recognize. Many of our favorite things appearances communicates their use; they show the change in their value though patina. As technologists we are now poised to imagine a world where computing objects communicate with us in-situ; where we are. We use our looks, feelings, and actions to give the computer the experience it needs to work with us.

Keyboards and mice will not continue to dominate computer user interfaces. Keyboard input will be replaced in large measure by systems that know what we want and require less explicit communication. Sensors are gaining fidelity and ubiquity to record presence and actions; sensors will notice when we enter a space, sit down, lie down pump iron, etc. Pervasive infrastructure is recording it.

This talk will cover projects from the Context Aware Computing Group At MIT Media Lab

Dr. Ted Selker is on the faculty of the MIT Media Lab, directing the Context Aware Computing Group. Previously he was an IBM Fellow and manager of User System Ergonomics Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center. He works on cognitive, graphical an physical interface. Ted has taught courses at Stanford, and previously worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Sunnyvale Reseach Laboratory. Ted is known for the design of the "TrackPoint III" in keyboard pointing device with performance advantages derived from a special behavioral/motor match algorithm, creating "COACH", an adaptive agent that improves user performance shipping this Fall in OS2, and the design of the 755CV notebook computer that doubles as an LCD projector.

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