Making Pervasive Computing Friendly and Intuitive
Speaker
Scott E. Fahlman
Research Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Description
The first wave of pervasive, semi-intelligent devices for the home is upon us, and most of us hate what we’ve seen so far. We are surrounded by devices with intriguing and potentially useful capabilities, but the user interfaces are so horrible that most of us (even some professors of computer science) just learn how to control the most basic functions—if we can even handle those! Now these devices are starting to communicate with one another—some would say “conspire”—and the situation is becoming even more infuriating.
In this talk, I will describe one possible solution: a central control computer—I call it the “house elf”—that is smart enough to provide one really good user interface, and that can then communicate our wishes to all the stupid, unfriendly legacy devices we have to deal with every day. The question then becomes, “Just how friendly and intuitive can we make this one critical interface?”
This is not a report on completed work, or even work in progress. It is an attempt to highlight a rich new area for future work at the intersection of HCI, AI, and pervasive computing.
Speaker's Bio
Scott E. Fahlman is a Research Professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, where he has been on the faculty since 1978. His primary departments are LTI and CSD, with affiliations in HCII and CALD. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977.
Dr. Fahlman has worked in many areas of AI: problem solving, knowledge representation, image processing, natural language, document classification, artificial neural networks, and the use of massively parallel machines to solve AI problems. He was one of the co-designers of the Common Lisp language. Currently he is working on Scone, a practical system that can represent a large body of real-world knowledge and that can efficiently perform search and simple inferences using that knowledge.
Dr. Fahlman is co-PI of the Radar Project, a large, five-year effort to build an AI-intensive “cognitive personal assistant” for busy managers.
Speaker's Website
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/