Gibbons Lecture Series: Beyond Touch: using everyday tools as input devices

Speaker: Dr Beryl Plimmer
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland

When: 6pm for 6.30pm start, Thursday 7th May, 2015
Where: Owen G Glenn Building, Room OGGB3/260-092, level-0
Note that there is public parking in the basement of the Owen G Glenn Building at 12 Grafton Road. Refreshments will be served in the level-1 lobby.

Dr Beryl Plimmer started her career in computing by completing a NZ Certificate in Data Processing at Auckland Institute of Technology. She then worked in IT at a number of local companies, including Nestles and Air New Zealand. She later returned to tertiary education, working at UNITEC and Manukau Institute of Technology, while herself studying for a Massey University Bachelor of Business Information Systems and a Masters degree from Curtin University. Cementing her interest in research, she completed a Computer Science PhD in the area of Human-Computer interaction at The University of Waikato and moved to The University of Auckland where she is an Associate Professor.

Dr Plimmer's research remains centred in Human-Computer Interaction. Her speciality lies in finding better interaction paradigms so that computers can be used by anybody without instruction. She has engaged in a research programme for the past 10 years that has attracted many grants and awards. Among her successes in this area was receipt of the "Best Paper Award" for the paper "Multimodal collaborative handwriting training for visually-impaired people" at the premier international Human-Computer Interaction conference "ACM CHI" in 2008. She teaches Auckland's advanced courses in Human Computer Interaction and supervises numerous student projects and theses.

Synopsis: Human thought is closely linked to the tools that we use to enact our intentions, by using language, by writing and drawing, and in controlling our immediate environment. In fashioning these tools we have adapted their physicality so that they are natural for us to use. This makes such tangible tools ideal to be further modified so as to be useful in our interactions with computers. Progress requires better sensing technologies, the use of Artificial Intelligence, innovative interaction design and software support. This talk will discuss this approach to HCI using examples from geometry, hand drawn diagramming and making messages with the Penan of Borneo’s object language.

The lecture will be streamed live.
Currently you can test the link to ensure that your computer is set up correctly.