Off the Beaten Path in Pervasive Computing

Many of our current research projects at MERL are squarely in the pervasive-computing realm, such as: interactive multi-user tabletop displays, operator-identifying automotive controls, digital home networking, location-aware RFID tags, semi-passive RFID tags for sensor networks, novel physical and chemical sensors, speech-based information retrieval for mobile devices, and vision-based person/object tracking. But because the results of this work have been or will be presented in forums familiar to the ubiquitous-computing community, I won’t describe them in this talk.

Instead, I hope to persuade you that the world of Pervasive Computing is bigger than it seems and that a broader perspective can lead to unexpected discoveries and opportunities. I will use a number of MERL projects to make my point.

(This is a reprise of Joe’s keynote talk for Pervasive Computing 2006.)

Speaker Details

Joe Marks grew up in Dublin, Ireland, before emigrating to the U.S. in 1979. He holds three degrees from Harvard University. His areas of interest include computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. He has worked previously at Bolt Beranek and Newman and at Digital’s Cambridge Research Laboratory. He is currently the Director of MERL Research. He is also the recent past chair of ACM SIGART and the conference chair for SIGGRAPH 2007.

Date:
Speakers:
Joe Marks
Affiliation:
Director of Research, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)