Millner's research efforts focus primarily on two areas: (1) developing engaging technological tools that promote learning and creative expression and (2) designing supportive environments that invite broad participation with these technologies. In this dissertation, he argues that the ways in which people use chalk (e.g., drawing hopscotch grids) can serve as an inspiration for rethinking how people can harness the expressive power of computational technologies.

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The nature of healthcare is changing. It has to, given oft-cited population growth, staggering costs, and damaging inefficiencies. When personalized medicine, buttressed by new technology, becomes the norm, what are we realistically expected to do with increased individual responsibility, choice, and more readily available information? People tend to make unhealthy and irrational decisions. Preventative medicine is available right now in terms of the activities we do, the decisions we make, and even the things we care about.

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Making systems that understand language has long been a dream of artificial intelligence. This thesis develops a model for understanding language about space and movement in realistic situations.

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Lighting and illuminated displays shape our relations to urban environments and to one another at night—and increasingly during the day—by transforming what Kevin Lynch has referred to as the "image of the city" (1964). Today, the wide-spread availability of LEDs (light-emitting diodes), in combination with embedded, miniaturized computation, offer different ways of designing ambient infrastructures. In this dissertation, Seitinger explores these alternatives by exploiting the programmable and responsive capabilities of LED-based, low-resolution systems.

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Tangible Media as an area has not explored how the tangible handle is more than a marker or place-holder for digital data. Tangible Media can do more. It has the power to materialize and redefine our conception of space and content during the creative process. It can vary from an abstract token that represents a movie to an anthropomorphic plush that reflects the behavior of a sibling during play. Vaucelle's work begins by extending tangible concepts of representation and token-based interactions into movie editing and play scenarios.

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Subjective and affective elements are well-known to influence human decision making. This dissertation presents a theoretical and empirical framework on how human decision makers' subjective experience and affective prediction influence their choice behavior under uncertainty, frames and emotions. The framework extends and integrates the existing theories, such as Prospect Theory (PT) and reinforcement learning (RL), drawing on a growing literature offering the role of affect in decision making and the neural underpinnings of human decision behavior.

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Empathy is a core ingredient to caring and successful relationships. The ability to perceive and respond to another has profound implications for a variety of relationship dynamics and can contribute to reducing violence, enhancing collaboration, supporting innovation. This dissertation contains contributions across the theoretical, design, and empirical dimensions of empathy development. Theoretically, a framework for supporting the development of empathy in youth through the exploration of emotion and identity is discussed.

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This talk will present the design approach for technological tools that may enhance playful interaction for a vast variety of people, e.g. for cardiac patients, stroke patients, hospitalised children, home care, autistic children, dementia patients, and handicapped children in Africa. The approach builds upon the development of modular robotics to create a kind of playware, which is flexible in both set-up and activity building for anybody and anywhere.

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Professor Perlin will present recent research in procedural modeling, responsive animation, pressure-sensitive input devices, and new approaches to learning games. There will be lots of live demos and some new hardware.

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