Kia Höök
Professor, KTH Stockholm, Sweden
Monday 20th, 9:30
Designing with Actuation -- not sensing?
Despite its importance in our lives, technology is still frequently frustrating, dehumanising, or just plain boring. So while our everyday life is saturated with technology, our relationship to it is still very far from perfect. In the Internet of Things era, we will be surrounded by even more technology. What could a stronger focus on enjoyment, creativity and engagement - for all - bring? I will present some of the tactics, methods and insights gained from the work in the Mobile Life centre where we learnt early on that the focus on data and sensing is not the key to bringing out relevant and interesting applications. Instead, we learnt how to see Internet of Things as a 'design material’, in particular focusing on the actuation. To make technology rhyme with our everyday engagement, we explore aesthetics, the role of the materials in our design processes and we work interdisciplinary. To make this shift, we often collaborate with experts in a varied set of fields – such as fashion studies, fine art, opera, medical science, street performance, TV-production or somaesthetic practices. We get inspired by doing studies on people's mundane leisure and creative activities such as horseback riding, hunting, parkour, dancing or live-action role-playing. We use those insights to spur innovative design processes, resulting in sensor-based applications, pervasive games, new mobile media, technical platforms and materials to support amateurs’ creativity -but always with a focus on what the system brings to our lives. |
Kristina Höök is a Professor in Interaction Design at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and part-time at SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science). She heads the Mobile Life centre. She is known for her work on social navigation, seamfulness, affective loops and most recently on somaesthetic design.
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Xia Zhou
Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College, USA
Monday 20th, 13:15
Ubiquitous Sensing Using Visible Light
The ability to sense what we do and how we behave is crucial to help detect diseases, diagnose early symptoms of health issues, and foster healthier lifestyles. Existing sensing technologies, however, have significant drawbacks. They either are intrusive — we have to constantly carry or wear sensing devices (e.g., Apple Watch, Fitbit), or present serious privacy risks by capturing raw images, or are limited in sensing granularity. In this talk, I will present a radically different approach to unobtrusive human sensing, which exploits the ubiquitous light around us as a sensing medium that senses and responds to what we do, without requiring any on-body devices nor any cameras. I will first present LiSense, the first-of-its-kind system that reconstructs a 3D human skeleton in real time (60 Hz) using purely the light around us. Empowered by Visible Light Communication (VLC), LiSense uses shadows created by a human body from blocked light to reconstruct the 3D skeleton. I will then present our recent effort StarLight, which advances LiSense by addressing several practical issues and pushes light sensing closer to practice. I will conclude with our ongoing work and future directions. |
Xia Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. She received her PhD at UC Santa Barbara in 2013. Her research interests are in mobile systems and wireless networking. Her recent work on visible light communication systems has won the Best Video Award at MobiCom 2015 and 2016, Best Demo Award at MobiSys 2015, and the Best Paper Award at ACM VLCS 2014. Her work on spectrum distributions won Best Practical Paper Award at SIGMETRICS 2013, and Best Paper Award Finalist at MobiCom 2008. She also won other paper awards in UbiComp 2014 and 2015, HotWireless 2015. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2016 and Google Faculty Research Award in 2014.
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Sara Mazur
Vice President & Head of Ericsson Research, Sweden
Tuesday 22nd, 9:00
5G – a game changer
Sara Mazur is the head of Ericsson Research, where she manages a team of 650 researchers across the globe, all dedicated to innovation and developing the technologies that are still five to seven years out. She has a PhD in electrical engineering and was an Associate Professor in fusion plasma physics. She owns 69 patents and literally wrote the book on adaptive antennas, so it's safe to say her interest in 5G is not to contribute to the hype, but to make it deliver from a practical and technological perspective. |