Group Introductions

Add a paragraph about yourself and your work here:

Jay was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but was quickly transplanted to the
mid-sized pacific northwest town of Yakima Washington where he grew up changing sprinklers,building rockets, raising pigs and playing with a Commodore-64.

His work experience includes every non-managerial job title at McDonalds, Systems and Network Administration for a small ISP, tutoring college students in chemistry and children's magic shows. Additionally, he has worked in government and
corporate research labs as a research fellow, including training computers to recognize threat objects for a next-generation airport security scanner and microcontroller based smart-sensors.

Jay entered the PhD program at Georgia Tech in 2001, after completing a
Masters Degree in Computer Science at Oregon State University in 2001 working on visual programming languages with Dr. Margaret Burnett and a BS in CS from Central Washington University in 1999.

His major focus of research has been the development and evaluation of Virtual
Rear Projection, which attempts to use multiple redundant projectors (under computer control) to provide a robust display in the face of occlusions (people walking between the projectors and the screen). An additional benefit of VRP is that it does not cast blinding light on to people. These features make VRP useful for deploying large interactive surfaces for applications such as electronic whiteboards.

Jay has qualified and completed the breath requirement, and is one class away from
finishing his minor. He intends to propose this semester and graduate in the 2005-2006 academic year.

Giovanni

I was born in Torino, Italy, at tea time on July 19th 1974. I lived then in Holland, Connecticut and Italy.
I graduated in Computer Engineering from Padua University (Italy) in 1999, after spending one year at Freiburg's University (Germany) Institute for Informatics and Social Sciences, writing my Master's thesis on IT security evaluation criteria and multilateral security.

After graduation, I worked for an IT firm providing corporate consulting services in the fields of security management, personal data protection and mobile 3G applications.

In 2002 I joined the Computer Science PhD program at Georgia Institute of Technology, where I continue my research in Information Security, especially in connection to ubiquitous computing applications and social issues.

I am currently working on my PHD proposal. In my proposal, my intent is to develop an analysis and design method for ubicomp applications which allows to:
– incorporate personal and social security and privacy matters in the analysis and design practice of ubicomp applications;
– show how to discover what these issues are and how to describe them (with examples and techniques);
– explain how, once identified, these issues can inform the design of applications;
– and predict the expected effects on the resulting service or application of changes in the design.

Recently he has worked on a project involving the Personal Audio Loop, a short-term memory aid device with relevant privacy implications and competing stakeholders concerns.

Julie

I was born and raised in the small town of Marion, Ohio, with parents who have no technical saavy whatsoever. For financial reasons, I ended up doing my undergrad at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Through Toledo's mandatory co-op program, I completed six co-ops/internships before starting graduate school in various places around the U.S. These included 4 semesters in industry: 1 semester at SDRC (now EDS) doing QA work, 2 semesters at Compaq's Alpha Development group (now owned by Intel), and one semester at Intel post undergrad, where I worked on implementing a vision system into their assembly line.

Lack of research opportunities at Toledo prompted me to look externally. My first research experience was working with databases at Argonne National Lab. My second experience in research, and what has got me where I am today, was in Berkeley's summer undergraduate research program, where I worked with Anind Dey and Jen Mankoff in designing, developing, deploying, and evaluating two types of ambient displays. This is what made me decide to focus my research interests on HCI.

I joined the PhD program at Georgia Tech in 2003 already knowing I wanted to do HCI work and do something along the lines of assistive technology. My main research focus so far has been to deeply explore the domain of autism, and in particular Applied Behavior Analysis therapy, for opportunities for capture and access applications. Using the domain of autism for a test grounds, I have decided to focus on using computational perception and computer vision as a means of doing activity recognition to automate the process of grading trials in ABA therapy. Through this work, I hope to expand it to look at overall HCI issues in computational perception, especially issues in designing interfaces to support perception and how to handle imperfect perception.

Kris

I came to Georgia Tech in 1996 to the Learning by Design project working with Janet Kolodner to support our family as my husband pursued his CS Ph. D. at Tech. I used my secondary teaching and curriculum experience to develop software supporting a new science curriculum and its adoption by classroom teachers. My experience in commercial application development peaked my interest in HCI, in the days of punched cards, text entry menus, and eventually windowed systems! The interface to the end-user was always debated, but ultimately produced according to the manager’s notions of what is “best”. There had to be way to produce more usable interfaces for a wider set of users! I am also interested in how computing in the home can integrate with our daily routines: providing the “right” info with minimal human interaction, whenever it is needed, but not obtrusively. In 2000, I became a full-time Ph.D. student, working in the Aware Home with a focus on verbal communication between family members. I have recently looked at environmental factors in homelife that correlate with one member’s accessibility to other family members, both within and across homes. I am currently exploring the sociology of home life, looking at boundaries as they are defined, evolve, and reveal one’s current role. This will motivate the thesis I am preparing as a proposal this fall:

Technology can assist humans in determining mutually appropriate times to initiate conversation. Some natural activities of a person’s home life can be sampled as a set of environmental factors which then serve as an indicator for an individual’s availability. These external factors can be used by family members to learn remote household routines of availability and to determine when to initiate conversation across homes.

Heather R.

I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I did my undergraduate in CS at Michigan State. While there I started doing undergraduate research in software engineering, formal specification of design models. Working with my advisor there, Dr. Betty Cheng, was what led me to consider getting a PhD and sticking with academia.

I came to Georgia Tech in 1997 (after I got side tracked to CMU for a year) and started working with Gregory in software engineering and HCI. My research has focused on capturing meetings, both general and specific software development types of meetings. We started applying capture and access technology to recording software architectural analysis meetings. I later began to look at meeting capture and access in general with the goal of gaining more widespread, realistic usage of a system. I collaborated with IBM and Boeing on the TeamSpace system, starting with a summer internship in 2000. Finally, I returned to the software engineering domain with the TAGGER project, investigating the capture and indexing of knowledge acquisition sessions.

I plan to defend in early spring 2005 and graduate in May 2005. Finally. And get a faculty position somewhere and cultivate my own posse of graduate students.

Shwetak Patel

I was born and raised in Birmingham, AL. To be absolutely clear I don’t have a southern accent, I don’t like cow tipping, I don’t enjoy Nascar, I don’t enjoy hunting, I don’t have a beer belly, and I don’t drive a pickup truck.

I was fortunate enough to attend a high school where Juniors and Seniors we were required to participate in research internships during the school year. As a result I was able to get my feet wet in research fairly early. I worked at Southern Research Institute where I developed an automated digital microscopy system and a patent is currently pending on that work. I also received the Intel/Westinghouse Science Award (Jr. Nobel Prize).

After HS I decided to come to Gatech for my bachelors in CS (although I already knew my ultimate goal was PhD). By my second year at Tech I started working with Gregory in the Aware Home and have been working with him since. After about 2.5 years of ugrad I transitioned to the CS PhD program.

Two of my research interests are novel uses of mobile technologies, in particular mobile phones and automated media annotation. The increasing pervasiveness and capabilities of these devices have begun to provide many interesting research opportunities in ubicomp. I’m particularly interested in how devices can play a role in capture and novel interacting techniques with the physical world. I am also currently working on ways to automate the arduous task of annotating home video by using various sensing techniques at the time of capture. However, I am interested in looking at generalizing the notion of annotation that extends beyond personal digital media.

Xuehai Bian

Xuehai is from China. Later on, he joined the Ph.D program here in 2001 and became the member of ubicomp group since spring, 2002. He has been playing with using sound localizer to infer activities. He was also involved in building infrastructure in awarehome. He is using SSL system to monitor the house with the sound event map and infers conversation activity. His recent project includes: autistic behavior recognition, infrared body wearable sensors and cooking activity recognition. His interest is to add more sensors, both on-body and environmental, in oder to detect and recognize activities.

Khai Truong

Khai N. Truong is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing and the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. He graduated from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering with Highest Honors in 1997, receiving a Bachelor of Computer Engineering degree. His research interest is in human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing, specifically in the area of automating the capture of experiences and providing access to them. He is a member of the Ubicomp (Ubicomp Computing) research group at Georgia Tech. His advisor is Dr. Gregory Abowd.

Khai is finishing his dissertation and hopes to graduate this year. He is currently looking for employment opportunities.

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Last modified 16 February 2006 at 2:49 pm by ip247-10.ct.co.cr