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X-WR-CALNAME:HCI Seminar Series Spring 2008 Events
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DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20080502T140000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20080502T150000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=1771
SUMMARY:Interactive Machine Learning
LOCATION:Patil/Kiva Seminar Room G449
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Spring 2008\nSpeaker:  Dan Olsen\, Brigham Young University\nHost: Rob Miller\, MIT CSAIL\nContact: Michael Bernstein\, x3-0452\, msbernst@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:45PM\nRelevant URL: <a href=""></a>\nMachine learning offers the promise of assisting users to create new tools simply by demonstrating the desired outcome. We have built one such tool "Image Processing with Crayons" for creating classifiers for image-based problems. The tool empowers a much larger class of people who can create image-based interactive techniques.\n\nHowever\, our observations of people using Crayons have pointed out several challenges in the way machine learning algorithms are designed. People do not behave in statistically uniform distributions and more importantly their interaction with the learning algorithm distorts their behavior in specific ways. The lessons we have learned will be discussed along new directions for machine learning algorithms that might learn faster in the face of user behavior.\n\nSpeaker Bio:\nDan R. Olsen Jr. is a Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. He was formerly the director of CMU's HCI Institute and founding editor of ACM's Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (TOCHI). For the last 25 years he has been working on software architectures and techniques to support the construction of user interfaces. His most recent work is in human-robot interaction and in architectures that integrate machine learning into the user interface.
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DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20080508T103000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20080508T113000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=1696
SUMMARY:User Experience Research Challenges in Media Spaces for eLearning
LOCATION:Patil/Kiva Seminar Room G449
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Spring 2008\nSpeaker:  Ronald Baecker\, Knowledge Media Design Institute and Dept of Computer Science\, University of Toronto\nHost: Rob Miller\, MIT CSAIL\nContact: Michael Bernstein\, 253-0452\, msbernst@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 10:15AM\nRelevant URL: <a href=""></a>\nNote the unusual seminar date and time!\n\nMedia spaces are environments that incorporate computer and communication technologies\, typically including the Internet\, to allow distributed groups of individuals to interact in real-time.  My talk will begin by reviewing past media space work on desktop videoconferencing\, electronic classrooms\, and meeting capture\, especially projects at Xerox\, Toronto\, Sun\, Berkeley\, Microsoft\, and Georgia Tech. We focus particularly on webcasting as an interesting media space that has excellent potential for scalability across a large number of sites.  The downside is that webcasting is typically a one-way broadcast from a transmitter to a multitude of receivers\, and an ephemeral event that exists only during the live broadcast.\n\nThe Toronto ePresence Interactive Media system creates a media space that allows distributed groups of individuals to participate and interact in webcast events such as lectures\, and to do so before\, during\, and after the event. ePresence incorporates a modular Web services architecture and XML-based data structures to facilitate interfacing with other eLearning\, collaboration\, and content management applications.   The system supports the broadcasting of video\, audio\, slides\, and screen captures; concurrent slide review; integrated moderated chat and VoIP support for questions and discussion; tailorable skins; the automated creation of embeddable\, structured\, navigable\, and searchable event archives; and the bookmarking and tagging of points in archived presentations.  Speakers are not forced to use Powerpoint — ePresence transmits several rich media presentation formats.  Recently\, a new webconferencing subsystem has been added.\n\nThe system is highly cross-platform\, supports audio-only viewing at bandwidths as low as 56K\, and is being distributed as open source source software.  I shall introduce the system and describe some eLearning and medical education projects to which it has been applied.\n\nPerhaps the most important achievement is the creation of a flexible\, modular\, extensible infrastructure for exploring frontiers of media spaces for learning and collaboration\, for example:\n• combining webcasting to many viewers with webconferencing to a few participants\n• enhancing in-room awareness of remote participants via text chat displays and webcam slow scan video\n• enabling persistent conversation over webcasts (both live and archived) for learning communities\n• achieving voice recognition of lectures\, and solving human factors issues with imperfect transcripts; and\n• exploring the use of automated multi-camera cinematography for enhancing the sense of presence.\nWe shall report on recent results in tackling these challenges\, and areas where work remains to be done.\n\nSpeaker Biography:\nRonald Baecker is Professor of Computer Science\, Bell University Laboratories Chair in Human-Computer Interaction\, and founder and Chief Scientist of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.  He is Affiliate Scientist with the Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit of Baycrest\, Adjunct Scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute\, and was during the first half of 2006 on academic leave as Visiting Professor\, Cognitive Neuroscience\, Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons.  Baecker is also Principal Investigator of the CDN$5.5M Canada-wide NSERC Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research (NECTAR)\, has been named one of the 60 Pioneers of Computer Graphics by ACM SIGGRAPH\, has been elected to the CHI (Computers and Human Interaction) Academy by ACM SIGCHI\, and has been awarded the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award and the Leadership Award of Merit from the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION).  He has published over 125 papers and articles\, is author or co-author of four books and co-holder of 2 patents\, and has founded and run two software companies.  His current entrepreneurial venture is a virtual non-profit foundation within the University of Toronto to distribute and support the open source ePresence Interactive Media system (http://epresence.tv). His B.Sc.\, M.Sc.\, and Ph.D. are from M.I.T.\n\nJoint work with Peter Wolf\, Kelly Rankin\, Gale Moore\, Elaine Toms\, Gerald Penn\, Kostas Plataniotis\, Rhys Causey\, Cosmin Munteanu\, Miller Peterson\, Eric Smith\, Dritan Xhibija\, and James Vaughn.\n\nRon will be giving a different talk on Wednesday\, May 7th at Harvard's Initiative for Innovative Computing\, which may be of interest: <a href="http://iic.harvard.edu/seminars/050708.html">http://iic.harvard.edu/seminars/050708.html</a>
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DTSTART;TZID=US/Eastern:20080516T140000
DTEND;TZID=US/Eastern:20080516T150000
URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=1698
SUMMARY:Processing
LOCATION:Patil/Kiva Seminar Room G449
DESCRIPTION:Series: HCI Seminar Series Spring 2008\nSpeaker:  Ben Fry\, Processing\nHost: Rob Miller\, MIT CSAIL\nContact: Michael Bernstein\, x3-0452\, msbernst@mit.edu\nRefreshment Time: 1:45PM\nRelevant URL: <a href=""></a>\nWhat began as a domain-specific extension to Java targeted towards artists and designers has turned into a full-blown design and prototyping tool used for large scale installation work\, motion graphics\, and complex data visualization. Ben Fry\, co-developer of the ‘Processing’ project will discuss work being developed by artists\, designers\, programmers and scientists who make use of Processing to create everything from experimental interfaces to beer commercials. Fry will also discuss his own information design and visualization projects that range from genetics to politics to understanding how software works.\n\nSpeaker Bio:\nBen Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory\, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science\, Statistics\, Graphic Design\, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. After completing his thesis\, he spent time developing tools for the visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edyth Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year\, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He currently works as a designer in Cambridge\, MA.\n\nWith Casey Reas of UCLA\, he currently develops Processing\, an open source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software that won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. In 2006\, Fry received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the project.\n\nHis personal work has shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003. Other pieces have appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York\, at Ars Electronica in Linz\, Austria and in the films “Minority Report” and “The Hulk.” His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature\, New York Magazine\, and Seed
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