New HCII Director Is Ready To Get Started
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In the early 1970s in a small town near Vancouver, a young Anind Dey wrote his first computer program on a Timex Sinclair computer under the watchful eye of his older brother. It was just a word game, something where you had to guess the letter. But it started him down the path that would eventually lead from Canada to Pittsburgh, where he took the reins as Geschke chair and head of Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute this past June.
That journey didn’t happen overnight, though, and it certainly didn’t start with the intention of ending at the HCII.
The son of two high school teachers, Dey originally set his sights on a career in computer/electrical engineering, and enrolled in Canada’s Simon Fraser University for his undergraduate work. During his second year, though, he attended a conference that featured site tours of various engineering companies, including one that designed six-degree-of-freedom motion simulators for aircraft. “I was in love,” Dey said, “I thought that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.” The next day, he visited the company on his own with one purpose — to ask them what he needed to do to work there. Their advice? “Leave Canada and go to the U.S. to get a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering. Then come back.”
So he did. Sort of.
After completing his work at Simon Fraser, Dey was admitted to Georgia Tech — which at the time offered the best flight-simulation program in the country. But after a year he realized that aerospace engineering wasn’t the best fit for him. He didn’t give up, though, and completed a second year to earn his master’s degree. (“I can tell my kids that I’m a rocket scientist now,” he said.) During that second year of study, his mentors encouraged him to explore opportunities in computer science, which they thought might better suit his interests. So he did.
That’s when Dey’s path intersected with HCI. Working with Georgia Tech’s Gregory Abowd, Dey developed a toolkit for context-aware computing as his Ph.D. thesis. At the time, context-aware computing was nothing new — researchers had been attempting to understand the environment computer users were in and adapt applications to it for a few years — but Dey’s own work marked a transformation in the field. “Before then, any time you wanted to build a new application, you were building it from scratch. I identified some common abstractions that would make building context-aware applications much easier.”
The context toolkit in his pocket, Dey graduated from Georgia Tech and with wife Jennifer Mankoff (now an associate professor of HCI at CMU) moved to Berkeley, Calif., where he worked for Intel Research Labs at UC Berkeley. He still focused on context-aware systems, specifically sensor networks, but also had the opportunity to mentor students and teach as adjunct faculty at Berkeley. “I had this great dual life where I was a full-time researcher at Intel, but part of me felt like a faculty member at the same time,” Dey said. “I realized that the part of me that was really fulfilled was the faculty side, and I wanted to become a faculty member.”
With that in mind, and the arrival of their first child on the horizon, Dey and Mankoff began looking for faculty positions closer to family on the east coast. Mankoff contacted her former advisor, CMU HCII Professor Scott Hudson, who said the institute was looking for technologists and they should apply. They did, and both were hired. That was in 2004.
Since then, Dey has continued to work in adaptive systems. Now, though, that work focuses primarily on using technology to learn peoples’ behaviors over time. “My particular interest is trying to identify what is routine behavior and what is not,” he said.
One area where this could be applied is cognitive decline. “You can monitor routine behavior, and as soon as you start noting anomalous behavior, you might say this is the time when an occupational therapist should come and make a visit, or that this person should see their PCP right now,” he said.
In his new role as chair and department head in the HCII, Dey will add strategic planning to his to-do list. And though he just assumed the role from predecessor Justine Cassell a few months ago, he already has some ideas.
The first is to add a business or entrepreneurial element to the institute’s curriculum to prepare students for expanding HCI opportunities at startups and boutique firms. “CMU pioneered this idea that designers should be working with psychologists should be working with technologists,” he said. “I think it might be interesting for us to start thinking about how we bring entrepreneurship and business acumen and business development into our program.”
His second goal is to capitalize on the energy and research that the institute’s young faculty bring to the field, while maintaining the department’s nimbleness and dedication to interdisciplinary collaboration. “We’ve been very successful in hiring young faculty who are expanding our worldview of human-computer interaction. We have individuals working on advanced physical interaction techniques, or combining human-computer interaction with games and behavior change. Those are areas we’ve explored in the past, but with these new hires we can explore them quite a bit more.”
Dey also thinks the time is ripe for HCII faculty to join forces and go after grand challenges — discovering the next big thing in the field.
“Everyone is interacting with a computer in some form, and there are true grand challenges that our faculty are well-poised to address,” he said. “What is the next leap beyond touchscreen interaction and how is that going to impact the way people work? Are their societal-level problems that a better understanding of people and computing can address? I think there are some really large challenges that today’s world is pointing at us. We have the ability to answer those questions.”
As for academics, Dey is excited about the growth of new programs, like the master’s in education technology and learning science (METALS), which started with six students last year and now has 18. Undergraduate programs are popular too, with more than 100 students enrolled in the HCI minor that debuted in 2013. “One day soon, I think we’d like to consider having an independent major and recruit students directly into our program,” he said.
Mostly, he’s ready to get started.
“I was honored to be asked to become the director,” he said. “It’s both a tremendous honor and privilege, but it’s also a little bit scary at the same time.”
It’s certainly a long way from programming games on a Sinclair computer in a small town near Vancouver.