Keynote Speakers
Thursday, November 2 - Ted Warburton, UC Santa Cruz
Friday, November 3 - Sile O'Modhrain, Queens University, Belfast
Saturday, November 4 - Herbert Clark, Stanford University
Weight, Weight, Don't Tell Me
Ted Warburton
UC Santa Cruz
Remember the “Internet’s firstborn,” Ron Lussier’s dancing baby from 1996? Other than a vague sense of repeated gyrations, no one can recall any of the movements in particular. Why is that? While that animation was ground-breaking in many respects, to paraphrase a great writer, there was no there there. The dancing baby lacked personality because the movements themselves lacked “weight.” Each human being has a unique perceivable movement style composed of repeated recognizable elements that in combination and phrasing capture the liveliness of movement. The use of weight, or "effort quality," is a key element in movement style, defining a dynamic expressive range. In computer representation of human movement, however, weight is often an aspect of life-ness that gets diminished or lost in the process, contributing to a lack of groundedness, personality, and verisimilitude. In this talk, I unpack the idea of effort quality and describe current work with motion capture and telematics that puts the weight back on interface design.
Bio:
Edward C. (Ted) Warburton is Assistant Professor of Theater Arts/Dance and a member of the graduate faculty for the Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Warburton received his early training at the North Carolina School of the Arts and danced professionally with American Ballet Theater and Boston Ballet. His passion for interdisciplinary research stems from his graduate work at Harvard University, where he completed a master’s degree in technology and a doctoral degree in human development and psychology. Warburton’s current projects focus on thinking through dance, the use of interactive technologies in dance, and the development of new models for computer representation of human movement. He is Associate Editor of /Research in Dance Education/, and serves as Director of Research for the National Dance Education Organization.
Movement and Music: Designing Gestural Interfaces for Computer-Based Musical Instruments
Sile O’Modhrain
Queen’s University, Belfast
The concept of body-mediated or embodied interaction, of the coupling of interface and actor, has become increasingly relevant within the domain of HCI. With the reduced size and cost of a wide variety of sensor technologies and the ease with which they can be wirelessly deployed, on the body, in devices we carry with us and in the environment, comes the opportunity to use a wide range of human motion as an integral part of our interaction with many applications. While movement is potentially a rich, multidimensional source of information upon which interface designers can draw, its very richness poses many challenges in developing robust motion capture and gesture recognition systems. In this talk, I will suggest that lessons learned by designers of computer-based musical instruments whose task is to translate expressive movement into nuanced control of sound may now help to inform the design of movement-based interfaces for a much wider range of applications.
Bio
Sile O'Modhrain is a lecturer at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queens University in Belfast. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction, especially interfaces that couple gestural input with haptic display. Sile earned her master's degree in music technology from the University of York and her PhD from Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). She has also worked as a sound engineer and producer for BBC Network Radio. In 1994, she received a Fulbright scholarship, and went to Stanford to develop a prototype haptic interface for blind computer users. Her work with haptics eventually lead to a dissertation that explored the role of touch in the performer-instrument interaction loop. Before taking up her position at SARC, Sile directed the Palpable Machine's group at Media Lab Europe, where her work focused on gestural interfaces for hand-held devices.
Mixing Virtual and Actual
Herbert H. Clark
Stanford University
People often communicate with a mixture of virtual and actual elements. On the telephone, my sister and I and what we say are actual, even though our voices are virtual. In the London Underground, the warning expressed in the recording "Stand clear of the doors" is actual, even though the person making it is virtual. In the theater, Shakespeare, the actors, and I are actual, even though Romeo and Juliet and what they say are virtual. Mixtures like these cannot be accounted for in standard models of communication-for a variety of reasons. In this talk I introduce the notion of displaced actions (as on the telephone, in the London Underground, and in the theater) and characterize how they are used and interpreted in communication with a range of modern-day technologies.
Bio:
Herbert H. Clark is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He received his BA at Stanford in 1962 and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. He taught at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1966 to 1969 and, except for sabbatical leaves, has been at Stanford ever since. Although his early research was on meaning, reasoning, and understanding, for some years he has worked on language use in conversation and other daily activities. He has published over 100 research articles and four books, including Psychology and Language (1977, with Eve V. Clark), Arenas of Language Use (1992), and Using Language (1996). He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences.