CS Faculty Candidate Colloquium
Friday **Special Time & Location** April 25 10:45 - 11:50 AM Kelley 1007 David Merrill EECS Colloquium: Computer Science Faculty Candidate Ph.D. Candidate MIT Media Lab Embodied Media and Gestural Control: Enabling Natural Interactions with Digital Content The graphical user interface has become the de facto metaphor for information manipulation, communication, creative work and entertainment. Although our activities involving digital content have diverse workflows and goals, the desktop environment provides a one size fits all user interface (UI). The falling cost of sensing electronics and embedded computation now opens up new opportunities for the direction of UI progress. Innovative recent consumer interfaces such as the Wii and the iPhone indicate an emerging trend of co-design of sensing hardware, physical form, and software algorithms to enable compelling and natural interactions. These new platforms have only scratched the surface of a vast design space of physical interaction devices with gestural input, embedded computation, and rich feedback capabilities. For the computer to realize its potential as a tool that significantly extends our intellectual and expressive abilities, future interaction techniques must call upon our bodily understanding of the world and be more usable in our everyday physical environment. In this talk, I will begin with an overview of my research on a number of novel platforms for accessing and manipulating digital content. These projects use expressive gesture and visual attention as inputs, and explore multi-user interaction, physical materials, and the introduction of sensor network technology to create new UI possibilities. I will focus on my most ambitious project and Ph.D. topic, Siftables, a tangible interaction platform that gives physical embodiment to information and digital media items. The system utilizes sensing, graphical display, embedded computation and wireless communication to free interactions with digital content from the desktop environment. Siftables points the way toward a new generation of interactive tools that bend to our needs, rather than bending us to meet their limitations. For more information, please visit: http://web.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/ Biography: David Merrill is a Ph.D. candidate in the Ambient Intelligence Group at the MIT Media Lab (graduating in June 2008), working with professor Pattie Maes. He holds a masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. David's research is focused on physical interfaces and ubiquitous computing. His work has produced novel interaction techniques for music and digital sound that leverage existing knowledge and expressive gestures, systems for attention-sensitive browsing of information in the physical world, and the first general-purpose, distributed, inch-scale tangible user interface platform. He has lectured in computer science at Stanford and led music controller design workshops at the MIT Media Lab. David was a Mayfield fellow in 2001, and has been awarded graduate fellowships from Motorola (2005, 2006) and Samsung (2007). He is a member of IEEE, ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGGRAPH.
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