Speaker:

Gregory Abowd

Title:

Ubicomp and Health

Abstract:

Ubiquitous computing is often understood as the third generation of computing. It is mainstream and permeates our everyday lives.  Mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies have and will continue to have a dramatic impact on many application areas in our everyday lives. In this talk, I will explore a particular domain, health, and how ubicomp research can impact, and in turn be impacted by a focus on health.  There is an interesting continuum of applications research in health, ranging from straightforward use of existing commercial technologies to the innovative development of new technologies and computing techniques. Through a number of examples from our research at Georgia Tech, I will explore some of the opportunities, and challenges, of doing health-oriented research (and by extension any kind of applications-oriented research) as a ubicomp researcher.  I will also speculate on what the coming fourth generation of computing might bring and how it might impact applications research.

Bio:

Gregory D. Abowd is a Regents' and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech where he co-leads the Ubicomp Research Group with colleagues Drs. Rosa Arriaga and Agata Rozga. His research interests concern how the advanced information technologies of ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) impact our everyday lives when they are seamlessly integrated into our living spaces. Dr. Abowd's work has involved schools (Classroom 2000) and homes (The Aware Home), with a recent focus on health and particularly autism.  Dr. Abowd received the degree of B.S. in Honors Mathematics in 1986 from the University of Notre Dame. He then attended the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the Programming Research Group in the Computing Laboratory. From 1989-1992 he was a Research Associate/Postdoc with the Human-Computer Interaction Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in England. From 1992-1994, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology since 1994. He is an ACM Fellow, a member of the CHI Academy and recipient of the SIGCHI Social Impact Award and ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Award.