Women in HCI Lecture Series

Women in HCI Lecture: Allison Druin, HCIL
October 9, 2009 at Noon

Come and listen to Allison Druin’s talk about, "Mobile Technologies for Children," on October 9, 2009 at Noon in the Alliant Energy/Lee Liu Auditorium.

Abstract: "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."

Allison Druin is the Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) and an Associate Professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Her work includes: developing digital libraries for children; designing technologies for families; and creating collaborative storytelling technologies for the classroom. Druin’s most active research is the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) www.childrenslibrary.org, now the largest digital library in the world for children which she and colleagues expanded to a non-profit foundation. She is the author or editor of four books, and her most recent book was published Spring 2009: Mobile Technology for Children (Morgan Kaufmann, 2009). She received her Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of New Mexico, her M.S. in 1987 from the MIT Media Lab, and a B.F.A. in 1985 from Rhode Island School of Design.

 
View Allison Druin’s 2009 Women in HCI Lecture at Iowa State University
 

Sponsored by: Women in Human Computer Interaction Series, Women in STEM Speaker Series, and Committee on Lectures (funded by GSB). More info at www.lectures.iastate.edu

Women in HCI Lecture: Rosalind Picard, MIT
September 21, 2009 at 1:10pm

Come and listen to Rosalind Picard’s talk about, "Emotional Intelligence, Technology and Autism," on September 21 at 1:10pm in the Alliant Energy/Lee Liu Auditorium.

Abstract: "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."

Picard is the author of Affective Computing, a book instrumental in starting a new field by that name. She is teaching machines to sense and respond more intelligently to people’s emotions and to behave in ways that make more expressive communication possible. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, and leader of the new and growing Autism Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. She holds a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 
View Rosalind Picard’s 2009 Women in HCI Lecture at Iowa State University
 

Sponsored by: Women in Human Computer Interaction Series, Women in STEM Speaker Series, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Committee on Lectures (funded by GSB). More info at www.lectures.iastate.edu

2008

Women in HCI Lecture Series:
October 31, 2008 - Roberta Klatzky

The HCI Graduate Program will kick off their new Women in HCI Lecture Series on Friday, October 31 at noon in the Howe Hall Auditorium. Roberta Klatzky, a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and a faculty of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, will speak on, Centering the Human in Virtual and Augmented Reality: The Role of Psychophysics.

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.

 
View Roberta Klatzky’s 2008 Women in HCI Lecture at Iowa State University
 

More info at www.lectures.iastate.edu