Creating a Considerate World

June 18, 2010
Ted Selker | CyLab Mobility Research Center, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley

No longer will the sensors we develop simply be part of a control system. We are now poised to create a world where objects with computers in them can recognize our looks, feelings, and actions to simplify how we work with them. New systems will have to build social awareness into their feedback and attempts to actuate and effect things in the world. Context aware systems can recognize human intentions, making capabilities available as needed and reducing interruptions and disruption when they aren’t.

Collaborations between people and computers, as collaborations between people: systems will be improved with socially appropriate responses. This talk will present examples in which our intentions can be understood and acted on by computers. The work reaches across domains to demonstrate that human intentions can be recognized and respected in many complex natural scenarios. My demonstrations, ranging from beds to email systems, will show how systems can become more socially appropriate as we work to improve our lives without complicating them further. CarCOACH for example succeeds when working not to bother you when you are negotiating a complex maneuver or have heard the same comment many times. Disruption Manager as another example automatically mediating communication based on a cognitive model can improve human performance. With such new tools, people can begin to create a world where systems recognize our needs though our actions to reduce unnecessary complexity in how we work.

Speaker Details

Dr. Ted Selker came to the MIT Media lab in September of 1998. From 1999 until he left in June 2008 he was an Associate Professor and the Director of the Context Aware Computing Lab. His Context aware computing group created 48 research platforms to demonstrate that systems can recognize and respect human desires and intentions across many natural scenarios. The group is recognized for its work in creating environments that use sensors and artificial intelligence to create so-called virtual sensors; adaptive models of users to create keyboardless computer scenarios. Ted also directed Counter Intelligence, a forum discussing kitchens and domestic technology, lifestyles and supply changes as a result of technology. Ted created the Industrial Design Intelligence forum to discuss the need to understand cognitive science and quantitative experiments in doing product design. Additionally, from March 2004, to June 2008, Ted served as co-Director of the MIT/Caltech Voting Project. Prior to joining MIT faculty, Ted directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research Lab at IBM Research, where he became IBM Fellow in 1996. He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown Universities and worked at Xerox, PARC and Atari Research Labs. Ted’s research has contributed to products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. For example, his design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device is used in many notebook computers, his visualizations have been responsible for performance and usability improvements in products and his adaptive help system was the basis of products as well. Ted’s work has resulted in numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. Ted was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004 and the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006.