Keynote Speakers

Mary Czerwinski

Keynote Date: Wednesday, 7th

Title: The Future of Distributed Groups and their Use of Social Media

Abstract: Distributed team field research has shown that shared group awareness, coordination and informal communication are the most common ways for teams to inform each other of progress. In addition, we have observed that poorly documented, informal communication causes a fragmented workday due to frequent interruptions and knowledge loss due to the passage of time and team attrition. Because informal communication has both advantages and disadvantages for information sharing, it merits deeper study to allow any proposed solution to preserve the good while reducing the bad. Over the past several years, we have conducted a series of studies at Microsoft Corporation and beyond to document the nature of group conversations and communications. Based on surveys, lab studies, field studies and interviews, we have begun to develop a suite of tools that allow groups, both co-located and distributed, to stay more aware of their colleagues' actions, get on board to a new team more efficiently, and engage with each other at the most optimal times. Examples of many of these tools will be discussed, as will our progress in transitioning these ideas into real products.

Bio: Mary Czerwinski is a Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research, where she manages many diverse areas of human-computer interaction, including social computing, information visualization, CSCW, sensor-based interaction and healthcare. Mary has been an avid participant in the ACM SIGCHI community, sitting on the SIGCHI Executive Committee for the last 10 years, chairing CHI 2008, UIST 2005, Papers Chair for CHI 2000 and UIST 2010, in addition to many other conference volunteer roles. Mary was recently awrded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service award and was also inducted into the ACM CHI Academy. Mary has ~100 publications in HCI and psychology, and holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Mary is very involved in supporting academia as well, sitting on multiple university advisory boards and PhD student dissertation committees.

António Câmara

Keynote Date: Thursday, 8th

Title: Natural User Interfaces

Abstract: Recent developments in user-input technologies are changing the way we interact with digital screens. The mouse and the keyboard are being replaced by touch and motion based interfaces, increasingly known as Natural User Interfaces (NUI). YDreams has developed Yvision, a platform that enables the development of natural user interfaces. YVision has a modular architecture matching YDreams technologies with the best of open source third party libraries. Our technologies emphasize the creation of smart interfaces using autonomous agents that go beyond the traditional reactive systems. Yvision also includes computer vision algorithms for motion detection and the application of 3D depth sensing in rendering engines.
NUI applications involve: data acquisition using various sensors that detect the user's motion and gestures; interpretation of sensor data; and presentation, the end visualization layer. YVision includes augmented reality capabilities as a visualization component, where images are captured from the real world and enhanced in real-time with contextual information. Natural user interface applications, developed for both 2D and 3D depth sensing, will be presented for illustrative purposes. Applications include projects developed for clients such as Orange, Coca-Cola, Santander and Nike. Ongoing research projects focusing on digital signage and serious games will be also discussed.

Bio: António Câmara is Chief Executive Officer of YDreams and Professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He got a BSc in Civil Engineering at IST (1977) and MSc (1979) and PhD (1982) in Environmental Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. António Câmara was a Post-Doctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Visiting Professor at Cornell University (1988-89) and MIT (1998-99).
António Câmara has been a pioneer on geographical information systems research. He published over 150 refereed papers and the "Spatial Multimedia and Virtual Reality" published by Taylor & Francis (1999) and "Environmental Systems" published by Oxford University Press (2002).
He is a founder of YDreams, a international leader in interactivity. YDreams has developed more than 600 projects in 25 countries for companies such as Nike, Adidas, Santander, Coca-Cola, NOKIA and Vodafone. The company has received over twenty awards including the Industrial Design Society of America Gold Award for Interactive Environments in 2004, and the Auggies, Augmented Reality's Oscar, in 2010. YDreams projects and products have been profiled in the New York Times, Guardian, Liberation, El Pais, Business Week, Economist, Wired, Engadaget, Gizmodo, CNN and CNBC. António Câmara has received several national and international awards, namely Premio Pessoa in 2006

Saul Greenberg

Keynote Date: Friday, 9th

Title: Proxemic Interactions: the New Ubicomp?

Abstract: In the everyday world, much of what we do as social beings is dictated by how we interpret spatial relationships. This is called proxemics, and is part of the glue that comprises our natural social fabric. What is surprising is how little people's expectations of spatial relationships are used in interaction design within ubiquitous computing (UBICOMP) ecologies, i.e., in terms of mediating people's interactions with surrounding digital devices such as digital surfaces, mobile phones, tablets, computers, and other information appliances. Proxemic interaction imagines a world of devices that have fine-grained knowledge of nearby people and other devices - how they move into range, their precise distance, their identity and even their orientation - and how such knowledge can be exploited to design interaction techniques. Just as people expect increasing engagement and intimacy as they approach others, so should they naturally expect increasing connectivity and interaction possibilities as they bring themselves and their devices in close proximity to one another and to other things in their everyday ecology.
In this keynote, I will describe and illustrate proxemic interactions as realized in several projects in my laboratory. My goal is to advocate proxemics as a more natural way of mediating inter-entity interactions in Ubiquitous Computing (UBICOMP) environments, while still cautioning about the many pitfalls around its use.

Bio: Saul Greenberg is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. While he is a computer scientist by training, the work by Saul and his talented students typifies the cross-discipline aspects of Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing. He and his crew are well known for their development of: toolkits enabling rapid prototyping of groupware and ubiquitous appliances; innovative and seminal system designs based on observations of social phenomenon; articulation of design-oriented social science theories, and refinement of evaluation methods.
His research is well-recognized. He holds the iCORE/NSERC/Smart Technologies Industrial Chair in Interactive Technologies. He also holds a University Professorship, which is a distinguished University of Calgary award recognizing research excellence. He received the CHCCS Achievement award in May 2007 and was also elected to the ACM CHI Academy in April 2005 for his overall contributions to the field of Human Computer Interaction.
Saul is a prolific author who has authored and edited several books and published many refereed articles, as listed at http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/papers/ . He is also known for his strong commitment in making his tools, systems, and educational material readily available to other researchers and educators. His new book will be available shortly: "Sketching User Experience: The Workbook, co-authored with Sheelagh Carpendale, Nicolai Marquardt and Bill Buxton (Morgan Kaufmann Press).