PANEL: Technologies for Natural User Interactions

This session will focus on both research and commercial technologies for a variety of NUI input modalities. Of course, body tracking based on 3D cameras is a key technology in Kinect, but numerous existing and upcoming technologies, from full 3D face tracking to brain-computer interfaces, are available in our envisionings of the future of computer-mediated living. We will look at the ways in which we specify such systems and their programming models, and explore potential paradigm shifts in how complex sensor input is converted to user intent.

Speaker Details

Andrew Fitzgibbon is a Royal Society University Research fellow working in Oxford University’s Visual Geometry Group. Following undergraduate work at the National University of Ireland, he received his PhD from Edinburgh University in 1997. He has twice received the IEEE’s Marr Prize and software based on his work won an Engineering Emmy Award in 2002 for significant contributions to the creation of complex visual effects. His research interests are in the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics, with excursions into neuroscience.

Jamie Shotton studied Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, and remained at Cambridge for his PhD in Computer Vision and Visual Object Recognition, graduating in 2007. He was awarded the Toshiba Fellowship and travelled to Japan to continue his research at the Toshiba Corporate Research & Development Center in Kawasaki. In 2008 he returned to the UK and started work at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the Machine Learning & Perception group.

His research interests include Object Recognition, Machine Learning, Human Pose Estimation, Gesture and Action Recognition, and Medical Imaging. He has published papers in all the major computer vision conferences and journals, with a focus on object detection by modelling contours, semantic scene segmentation exploiting both appearance and semantic context, and dense object part layout constraints. His demo on real-time semantic scene segmentation won the best demo award at CVPR 2008. More recently, he has investigated how many of the ideas from visual object recognition and machine learning can be adapted to new application areas. In human pose estimation, he architected the human body part recognition algorithm that drives Xbox Kinect’s skeletal tracking algorithm. In the sphere of medical imaging, he has published papers on the automatic detection of organs and other anatomical structures from CT data, with a view to simplifying and speeding up the radiologist’s workflow.

More information is available here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-US/people/jamiesho/default.aspx

John Winn is a senior researcher in the machine learning and perception group at MSR Cambridge. He has applied machine learning to applications ranging from recognising Bill Gates’ glasses in an image to understanding the genetic causes of asthma. His work on real time recognition of objects in video formed part of the groundwork behind the Xbox Kinect system. His goal in life is to make powerful machine learning techniques accessible to everyone so that they can have as much fun with them as he does.

Shahram joined the Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab in May 2005 as a member of the Computer Mediated Living Research Area. His research fits into the broad area of ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) and focuses on creating novel technologies that push the boundaries of how we interact with computers – beyond just the desktop and the workplace. He’s interested in exploring and understanding the implications of ubiquitous computing from various perspectives: From the underlying, infrastructure and system architecture issues, right through to application development, HCI and social implications.

Patrick Baudisch is a professor in Computer Science at Hasso Plattner Institute in Berlin/Potsdam and chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab. His research focuses on the miniaturization of mobile devices and touch input. Previously, Patrick Baudisch worked as a research scientist in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Research Group at Microsoft Research and at Xerox PARC and served as an Affiliate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Washington. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.

Date:
Speakers:
Andrew Fitzgibbon, Jamie Shotton, John Winn, Shahram Izadi, and Patrick Baudisch
Affiliation:
Microsoft, MSRC, University of Nottingham
    • Portrait of Andrew Fitzgibbon

      Andrew Fitzgibbon

      Partner Researcher

    • Portrait of Patrick Baudisch

      Patrick Baudisch

    • Portrait of Jamie Shotton

      Jamie Shotton

      Partner Director of Science

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running

    • Portrait of Shahram Izadi

      Shahram Izadi

      Principal Researcher/ Research Manager