I am truly passionate in researching and prototyping innovative breakthrough experiences that inspire product groups. My interest is ranging from productivity applications, videoconferencing, to education. I have a very strong background in computer science and engineering (hardware and software), a lot of original ideas to create experiences that solve real-world problems, and a unique ability to combine technologies together and prototype very quickly. For example, I created 32 high impact prototypes between June 2006 - June 2007 at Microsoft among other things.

I joined Microsoft in the US in March 2000. I have worked for several groups at Microsoft including Microsoft Research on the ConferenceXP research platform project, Advanced Strategy Group on an incubation project for kids and education working with Chuck Thacker and Margaret Johnson. This project launched a new company named Sabi in early 2008 (http://www.sabigames.com/). I am now back at Microsoft Research working directly with Bill Buxton on user experience research.

I personally demonstrated part of my work to executives at Microsoft including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Craig Mundie, Ray Ozzie, and many others.

I have a Ph.D. in parallel computing from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. I also have been working for 2 companies as a C.S. engineer in Switzerland prior joining Microsoft in the U.S. I won several awards including the prestigious LOGITECH prize for industrially-oriented innovative hardware/software senior project at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and a runner-up prize from the Microsoft internal employees Tablet PC developer contest for an innovative fun Tablet PC application for kids.

Recently, I have been working on innovative distributed collaboration experiences (CSCW2010 publication), smartphone exploration, and also collaborating with Ken Hinckley on pen and touch experiences (high level demo, detailed demo). You can also look at the Microsoft Campus Tours with demonstration of our project with the Larry Larsen and Microsoft Research General Manager Kevin Schofield (campus tour).

More info will come soon… In the meantime, you can enjoy the demos below:

Here are some fun demos of experiences for kids:

• Experience I created of a robot acting out a story: low_res / high_res / downloadable

• Experience I created of a story programmatically acted out on a Surface with play set: low_res / high_res / downloadable

• Experience that I co-invented with the Natural Language Processing group that converts text to animation on-the-fly in order to motivate kids to learn how to write: low_res / high_res / downloadable
• Text to animation conversion on-the-fly in the virtual and physical worlds: low_res / high_res / downloadable

Animated fonts:

This is an exploration project. The intent of this demo is only to show one possible implementation on how we could animate fonts procedurally in a very simple and scalable way (no canned graphics, everything is generated on-the-fly). The simplicity of the algorithm in this demo could even enable scenarios with slower CPU such as mobile devices. For example, this exploration could be used to animate text (a letter, a word, or a sentence) in IM, SMS messages, email, etc. when appropriate to emphasize an emotion. In addition, it could also be used in context of children’s reading to emphasize part of a text without having to create all the graphics.

• Explanations: high_res / downloadable
• Demo: high_res / downloadable

Hardware project example:

• A M68040 ISA Board for PC: click_here!

Other demos:

• Story authoring on Surface with cards that contain words on it (actor, action, location): low_res / high_res / downloadable
• Two-handed input demo: high_res / downloadable
• Collaborative tablet PC story creation tool for kids on ConferenceXP: low_res / high_res / downloadable
• Collaborative Visio application on ConferenceXP: low_res / high_res / downloadable
• Collaborative visual assessment tool application on ConferenceXP: low_res / high_res / downloadable

Recent Publications:

• Hinckley, Ken, Pahud, Michel, & Buxton, Bill (2010). Direct Display Interaction via Simultaneous Pen + Multi-touch Input. Society for Information Display (SID) Symposium Digest of Technical Papers, May 2010, Volume 41(1), Session 38, 537-540.
• Hinckley, K., Yatani, K., Pahud, M., Coddington, N., Rodenhouse, J., Wilson, A., Benko, H. & Buxton, B. (2010). Pen + Touch = New Tools. Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST'10), 27-36.
• Hinckley, K., Yatani, K., Pahud, M., Coddington, N., Rodenhouse, J., Wilson, A., Benko, H. & Buxton, B. (2010). Manual Deskterity : An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI'10 (alt.chi), 2793 - 2802.
• Tang, Anthony, Pahud, Michel, Inkpen, Kori, Benko, Hrvoje, Tang, John C. & Buxton, Bill (2010). Three's Company: Understanding Communication Channels in Three-Way Distributed Collaboration. CSCW '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 271-280.