Beyond Weiser’s Ubiquitous Computing: 2 Hopeful Ideas to Drive us Forward Together – Gregory D. Abowd, Regents’ and Distinguished Professor – School of Interactive Computing , Georgia Tech

A “TGIF” will follow at 3 p.m. on the 2nd floor of the Klaus commons area overlooking the Atrium.  Light snacks and refreshments will be served. 

Abstract:

I am an applied computer scientist; my passion is to understand state-of-the-art technologies and create ways they can be integrated into everyday experiences in order to serve some meaningful purpose to a collection of stakeholders. I read Mark Weiser’s inspiring vision of ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, when I joined the faculty in the College of Computing in 1994, and decided that Georgia Tech was the perfect place to explore applications of ubicomp.   While the grand idea of ubiquitous computing can still inspire lots of research, there are several new technologies that Weiser did not discuss that can and will influence computing research and its application.   Weiser described a 3rd generation of computing; I will describe both a 4th generation which has already emerged over the past decade, and a 5th generation that may soon emerge.  I will motivate two new collaborative initiatives, one motivated by 4th generation technologies and the other by 5th generation technologies. The first is CampusLife, an attempt to support the wellbeing of students at a university through understanding how their daily behaviors, signaled through  interactions with the physical and digital worlds, connect to both good and bad academic and health decisions. The second project is to rethink the embodiment of computing through the integration of materials science and computation, literally realizing Weiser’s figurative “weaving” of technology into the fabric of everyday life.

Bio:

Gregory D. Abowd is a Regents’ and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where he has been on the faculty since 1994. 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 as a Rhodes Scholar, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation. 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 graduated 23 PhD students who have gone on to a variety of successful careers in academia and industry.  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. He is also the founding President of the Atlanta Autism Consortium, a non-profit dedicated to enhancing communication and understanding across the varied stakeholder communities connected to autism.