Title: Understanding, Designing, and Developing Natural User Interactions for Children

Talk Abstract: The field of Natural User Interaction (NUI) focuses on allowing users to interact with technology through the range of human abilities, such as touch, voice, vision and motion. Children are still developing their cognitive and physical capabilities, creating unique design challenges and opportunities for interacting in these modalities. In this talk, Lisa Anthony will describe her research projects in (a) understanding children's expectations and abilities with respect to NUIs and (b) designing and developing new multimodal NUIs for children in a variety of contexts. Examples of projects she will present are her NSF-funded projects on understanding input behaviors by children using touch and gesture interaction on mobile devices, multimodal interaction, and design for interactive spherical displays for learning.

Speaker Bio: Lisa Anthony is presently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. She holds a BS and MS in Computer Science (Drexel University, 2002), and a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction (Carnegie Mellon University, 2008). After her PhD, Lisa spent two years in a research and development laboratory working on DARPA- and ONR-funded user-centered interface projects at an industry research lab, followed by two years working on multimodal interaction at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her current research interests include understanding how children can make use of advanced interaction techniques and how to develop technology to support them in variety of contexts, including education, healthcare and serious games. Her PhD dissertation investigated the use of handwriting input for middle school math tutoring software, and her simple and accurate multistroke gesture recognizers called $N and $P are well-known in the field of interactive surface gesture recognition.