Media Laboratory Colloquium Series 2000-2001

Speakers and Information

 

 

Daniel Carlin

Medicine in the Digital Age: The Next Iteration

January 31, 2001

ABSTRACT

This speech is both a look forward and a broad overview of the sweeping changes that have occurred within the medical community in response to the promise of the Internet and digital information tools. This presentation will discuss the nature of this change within a historical context and offer specific medical cases as illustrations of the magnitude of this change. Among topics to be discussed will be the use of webpage interfaces as information archives, language translation tools, and the issues of privacy and confidentiality. These developments will be noted within the context of the emerging de-centralization of healthcare i.e. the consumer will experience more elements of their healthcare outside the traditional bounds of hospitals and physician offices. The speech will close with a brief look at three of the most promising future areas of "digital medicine": the emergence of organized disease-centric patient and provider communities, the integrations of personal biomonitoring as a tool for longevity, and the global export of Western medical expertise to underserved areas throughout the world.

BIO

Dr. Carlin was born on September 27, 1959 in Dalton, Massachusetts. In May 1981, he received a bachelor's degree in chemistry and philosophy from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston in May 1985 on a US Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. From June 1986 to June 1988, he served as ship's medical officer on the guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Mississippi (CGN-40). From June 1988 through June of 1989 he worked as a volunteer physician in an Afghan refugee camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and in the famine camps of the Southern Sudan. He completed residency training in emergency medicine through Columbia University in 1992 and achieved board certification in 1994. Since 1995, he has worked as founder and president of WorldClinic, an innovative private medical practice that utilizes modern telecommunication technologies to provide medical care to international travelers and expatriates. He is also an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts Univ. School of Medicine. Dr. Carlin's work has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, and several other major American and international newspapers including the BBC World News Service. He has also been featured on the television news show, NBC Dateline, as well as several scientific and technology news programs including The Discovery Channel. WorldClinic is located on the campus of the Lahey Clinic Medical Center near Boston, Massachusetts.
 
 

Robert St. Amant

Ibots, PUM's and Other Inhabitants of the User Interface

February 7, 2001

ABSTRACT

Consider a software agent that can launch a GUI application--say, Windows Solitaire, or Adobe Illustrator--and carry out the actions in it that we might expect of a human user. The agent recognizes text and graphics on the screen, comprehends the overall layout and relationships between graphical objects, constructs domain-specific plans, and executes them by direct manipulation of the environment. In my lab at NCSU we build such agents, which we call interface softbots, or ibots.

In this talk I will discuss the implications of viewing the user interface as a manipulable, visual environment shared between human users and software agents. We have built ibots for drawing, text editing, game playing, and comparable tasks, as well as agents that intelligently interpret user actions, and programmable user models (PUMs) that emonstrate the possibility of cognitively plausible interface agents. Our work has led to novel techniques for programming by example, intelligent visualization, and interface evaluation, on the practical front, and to the formalization of core HCI concepts, such as affordance, on the theoretical front.

BIO

Robert St. Amant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1996. His research interests include planning agents in the user interface, cognitively plausible interface agents, and assistants for information visualization and navigation.
 
 

Shuguang Zhang

Emerging Nanomaterials through Molecular Self-assembly

February 14, 2001

ABSTRACT

Understanding of new materials at the molecular level has become increasingly critical for a new generation of nanotechnology, namely, the design, synthesis and fabrication of nano-devices at the molecular scale. New technology through molecular self-assembly as a fabrication tool will become tremendously important in the coming decades. Basic engineering principles for microfabrication can be learned by understanding molecular self-assembly phenomena. Self-assembly phenomenon is ubiquitous in nature. The key elements in molecular self-assembly are chemical complementarity and structural compatibility through noncovalent interactions. We have defined the path to understanding these principles. Numerous self-assembling systems have been developed ranging from models to study of protein folding and protein conformational diseases, to molecular electronics, surface engineering, and nanotechnology. Several distinctive types of self-assembling peptide systems have been developed. Type I, "molecular Lego" forms a gel matrix scaffold for tissue engineering; Type II, "molecular switch" as a molecular actuator; Type III, "molecular hook" and "molecular Velcro" for surface engineering; Type IV, "molecular capsule" for gene delivery and Type V, "molecular cavity" for biomineralization. Type VIT, peptide nanotubes can be functionalized for fabricate nanodevices. these self-assembling systems are simple, versatile and easy to produce. These systems represent a significant advance in the molecular engineering for diverse technological innovations.

BIO

Shuguang Zhang is the Associate Director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He discovered a self-assembling peptide system while working in molecular and structural biology with Alexander Rich at MIT. This serendipitous discovery was selected to be one of the fifteen research achievements over last quart century at MIT. He pursues actively on the various self-assembling peptide systems to develop a new class of biological materials, that include peptide matrix scaffold for tissue engineering, biological surface engineering for cell pattern formation, molecular switch, molecular hook and molecular Velcro that interact with other biological molecules and cells. He also works on problems to gain understanding of a class of protein conformational diseases, including AlzheimerŐs, ParkinsonŐs and the prion diseases (mad cow disease). He holds two US patents and several additional pending patents on the self-assembling peptide systems.

He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and was a recipient of Regent Fellowship and a Graduate Mentor Fellowship at UCSB. He received his B.S. from Sichuan University in China. He was a past American Cancer Society Fellow at MIT. He is currently a Whitaker Foundation Investigator. He is a Visiting Professor of Tsinghua (Qinghua) University in Beijing and of Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. He is a Scientific Advisor for Acorda Therapeutics in New York; EngeneOS in Cambridge; and for Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation Research Center in Yokohama, Japan. He is members of AAAS, American Society of Biochemistry and molecular Biology (ASBMB), The Human Genome Organization Americas (HUGO), the Protein Society, New York Academy of Sciences, The International Society for the Study of Origin of Life (ISSOI) and the honorary society of Sigma Xi. He has been recently nominated for the 2001 Discovery Prize (administrated by the Discover Magazine and Disney).
 
 

W. Bradford Paley

Delivering Concrete Data to MoMA and the New York Stock Exchange: Perceptually/Cognitively Informed Information Design

February 21, 2001

ABSTRACT

Abstract information can be more easily understood when it is cast in concrete visual representations. Two case studies of delivered, working systems are discussed: The design of a handheld wireless device for Goldman Sachs, and the interactive part of the Mind'space exhibit in the Workspheres exhibition, currently showing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A design approach based on the multiple abilities of the human brain is presented. This approach posits an "information processing pipeline" through which input is successively refined through sensory, perceptual, cognitive, symbolic, linguistic, and structural processes in the brain. The approach also suggests that behavioral, emotional, and social processes, while not strictly part of information processing, are equally valuable in the design process.

This list of differing abilities is suggested not as mind science, but as a design checklist that can guide design and provide a framework for critique. The case studies are discussed in the context of this checklist: design features are related to the brain processes that inspired or explain them.

BIO

W. Bradford Paley is the founder of the New York interaction design firm Digital Image Design Incorporated. He is a recognized contributor to the fields of interaction design, scientific visualization, physical interface design, and ubiquitous computing.His accomplishments include:

Developing patented and award-winning interaction devices (the Cricket, a 3D mouse for desktop virtual reality; the Monkey, a doll-like input device for animators)

Founding "financial data visualization" groups (at Lehman Brothers in 1989, and J.P. Morgan in 1993) that did the first significant applied work in that field

Speaking regularly at organizations that explore novel interaction techniques; including SIGGRAPH, AIGA, SmartGraphics, United Digital Artists, various universities

Organizing the conference devoted to the design of physical computer interfaces: InvisibleComputing.org

Deploying advanced computer interfaces that are carefully tailored to thought processes involved in people's workflow, such as the handheld wireless device Goldman Sachs brokers use on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange

Developing and showing perceptually-informed sound/light "toys" based on physical simulation and constraint systems.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley; beginning his work in computer/human interaction in 1981. He has done innovative work devising new techniques for displaying complex or voluminous data, and developing new interaction paradigms for understanding and manipulating such data.

More information about his and DID's work can be found at http://didi.com and http://didi.com/~brad.
 
 

William A. Woods

Conceptual Indexing: Practical Large Scale AI for Efficient Information Access

February 28, 2001

ABSTRACT

Finding information is a problem shared by people and intelligent systems. This talk describes an experiment combining both human and machine aspects in a knowledge-based system to help people find information in text. Unlike many previous attempts, this system demonstrates a substantial improvement in search effectiveness by using linguistic and world knowledge and exploiting sophisticated knowledge representation techniques. It is also an example of practical subsumption technology on a large scale and with domain-independent knowledge. Results from this experiment are relevant to general problems of knowledge-based reasoning with large-scale knowledge bases.

BIO

William A. Woods is a Principal Scientist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. He is internationally known for his research in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, and knowledge representation and is currently interested in technology for improving people's access to information. He earned his doctorate at Harvard University, where he then served as an Assistant Professor and later as a Gordon McKay, Professor of the Practice of Computer Science. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Woods worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (BBN) when the Internet (then Arpanet) was being invented, and he built one of the first natural language question answering systems to answer questions about the Apollo 11 moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center. He was Principal Investigator for BBN's work in natural language processing and knowledge representation and for its first project in continuous speech understanding. Subsequently, he was Principal Scientist for Applied Expert Systems, Inc. and Principal Technologist for On Technology Inc.
 
 

John Canny

Human-Centered Computing: A View from the West

March 7, 2001

ABSTRACT

This talk is a snapshot in the evolution of Human-Centered Computing (HCC) at Berkeley. HCC pushes the emphasis in information system design to the human contexts in which those systems operate. HCC draws inspiration and understanding of those contexts from the social and behavioral sciences. This leads us in some interesting and counterintuitive directions.

This talk will be an overview of 3 such unbeaten paths in collaborative work. The first is the Livenotes collaborative note-taking system. Livenotes is based on a dialogical view of learning. It supports collaborative, small-team learning in conventional lecture classrooms. The second is the PRoPs project. Props are avatars in the physical world. They are based on a view of the experience of "being there" as situated action, shared context, mobility, and rich non-verbal communication. Within the PRoPs project, we have run studies of different media in social and work contexts. We have found that rich media are not always the best, and that there is a sweet spot of intermediate richness with audio only, i.e. the telephone generally wins over email and face-to-face for routine communication. Finally, I will summarize ongoing work in mining and using tacit knowledge in ubiquitous computing environments. Many researchers in knowledge work have remarked that much of the knowledge is embedded in patterns of user behavior and social relationships. With ubiquitous computing, we can examine and collect many snippets of data to gain an understanding of the whole. Applications include collaborative filtering and expert referrals, automatic organization of data, and a high-level notion of the context of human activities.

BIO

John Canny is a Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He graduated from the MIT AI Lab in 1987. His MS thesis described an edge detector that is still widely used, and his Ph.D. dissertation won the ACM award in 1987. His post-PhD work was about applying differential topology and algebra to improve the skills of robots. He has worked on manufacturing technologies, physically-based simulation, geometric modeling and computational geometry, and maintains an interest in 3D imaging and display. In 1998, he started building the Human-Centered Computing group. Current research interests are rich media for CSCW, collaborative learning, and context-aware computing.
 
 

Andy van Dam

Immersive VR for Scientific Visualization: A Progress Report

March 14, 2001

ABSTRACT

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) has the potential to be a powerful tool for the visualization of burgeoning scientific datasets and models. While IVR has been available for well over a decade, its use in scientific visualization is relatively new and many challenges remain before IVR can become a standard tool for the working scientist. In this presentation we provide a progress report and sketch a research agenda for the technology underlying IVR for scientific visualization. Among the interesting problem areas are how to do computational steering for exploration, how to use art-inspired visualization techniques for multi-valued data, and how to construct interaction techniques and metaphors for pleasant and efficient control of the environment.

BIO

Andries van Dam is Thomas J. Watson, Jr., University Professor of Technology and Education and professor of Computer Science at Brown University, and was one of the Computer Science Department's founders and its first Chairman, from 1979 to 1985. His research has concerned computer graphics, hypermedia systems, and educational software.

His publications include "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice," co-authored with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and J.F. Hughes, Addison- Wesley, 1990, and four other books, as well as over 90 papers.

He co-founded ACM SIGGRAPH, has been on the editorial board and editor of several computer graphics journals, and is on the Technical Advisory Board of multiple startups and of Microsoft Research.

Among his awards are the Society for Information Display's Special Recognition Award (1974), the IEEE Centennial Medal (1984), the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award (1991), the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1994), the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal (1999), and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education (2000).

In 1994 he became an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow. He received an honorary Ph.D. from Darmstadt Technical University in Germany (1995), and an honorary Ph.D. from Swarthmore College (1996). In 1996 he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and in 2000 into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 
 

Maribeth Back

Reinventing the Book: Experiments in the Future of Reading

March 21, 2001

ABSTRACT

Reading occupies center stage in our technological society. It is more ubiquitous and more necessary than computers, electricity, or the automobile. It is far older, and has become interwoven with every aspect of our daily lives. Reading is intrinsic to the ways we share knowledge, the ways we entertain ourselves, and how we manage our social, political, economic, and educational systems.

Reading continually changes; it adapts to whatever technological or social changes come along. Reading in some cultures is a social act, primarily performed in public. In these cultures, words are written on walls or in books that are spoken/performed publicly. In other cultures, reading tends to be more private, a personal experience. When the practice of reading changes, over time or acrosscultures, people's ideas about reading and writing also shift. Currently,our use of reading is undergoing huge and often controversialupheavals. The creation of most written language Đ its content, its genre, and even its physical embodiment - has changed utterly. The task of authoring has literally taken on new dimensions, as digital technologies enable the form of the reading device to match the content of the text.

"XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading" is a collection of interactive museum exhibits designed to explore how reading might continue to change in the near future. These robust hands-on prototypes, designed by researchers in the RED (Research in Experimental Documents) group at Xerox PARC, encourage visitors to try for themselves how new technologies might shape the reading experience. What is it like to read a book you can walk through...or one you can drive through? What if you had a book you could play like an instrument? How would reading a text that slides by on a tilting table surface be different from one that lets you burrow deeper and deeper into the sentences with your fingertip? The XFR show is an experiment in authoring form along with content, allowing ever more specific contextual interpretations of text and genre.

"XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading" was installed in the Center of the Edge Gallery at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation from March to September 2000. During that time more than 350,000 visitors saw the exhibit. In 2001, XFR begins a three-year tour in the United States.

BIO

Maribeth Back designs, builds, and writes about multi-sensory interfaces and environments. She is especially interested in the design integration of visual, sonic and haptic elements, and in the function of narrative modeling in ease-of-use for these designs.

Professionally, she is a design researcher and an audio engineer whose work includes experimental e-books, design for wireless interaction, and augmented reality systems. She has done sound design and engineering for live theatre, radio, and CD-ROM; sound theory and system design for virtual and computational environments; audio engineering for high-end recording studios; and performance and installation pieces, both solo and collaborative. For four years, she was resident sound designer at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. Back completed her doctorate at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in May 1996, while working as part of the MIT Media Lab's Brain Opera team. At Xerox PARC, she works with the RED group exploring emerging genres and new document types.
 
 

Rich Gold

The Plenitude

March 28, 2001

ABSTRACT

In this talk, drawn from The Plenitude, a new PowerPoint book-in-progress, Rich Gold will explore the artifacts he has created over the last thirty years to survive within the evolving culture of plenitude that surrounds and envelopes us. These artifacts will be drawn from his work in electronic music, art, writing, coin-op video games, home computer entertainment, ubiquitous computing, corporate aesthetics and some experiments in the future of reading. He will also draw a few conclusions on the meaning of making lots of stuff in a lifetime.

BIO

Rich Gold as a composer and artist in the 70s co-founded the "League of Automatic Music Composers", the first network computer band and invented the field of Algorithmic Symbolism, an example of which, "The Party Planner", was featured in Scientific American. In the 80s he headed of the sound and music department of Sega USA's coin-op video game division and was the inventor of the award winning "Little Computer People" (Activision), the first fully autonomous computerized person you could buy. For five years in the late 80s he headed the electronic and computer toy research group at Mattel Toys and was the manager of, among other interactive toys, the Mattel PowerGlove. He also worked on Captain Power, the first interactive broadcast TV show and ICVD an early CD based video system. After working as a consultant in Virtual Reality he joined Xerox PARC in 1991, where he was a researcher in Ubiquitous Computing, the study of invisible, embedded and tacit computation. He was a co-designer of the PARC Tab, helped launch the successful LiveBoard project and is the inventor or co-inventor on ten patents. In 1993 he created and now runs the PARC artist-in-residence program (PAIR), which pairs fine artists and scientists together based on shared technologies (the book "Art and Innovation", MIT Press, describes the project). He is currently the manager of a multi-disciplinary laboratory, RED (Research in Experimental Documents), which looks at the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering. His particular area of study has been in corporate identity within new genres; "living documents" (ever changing documents deeply embedded in ever changing cultures) and R2B (how to move research to business). REDŐs current project is called "Experiments in the Future of Reading" and is being featured at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation during the year 2000. The experiments are based on the concepts of "Total Writing", an anti-convergent theory where the media itself becomes authorable. He is a Fellow at The World Economic Forum, a RegentŐs Lecturer at UC Berkeley and as an Applied Cartoonist gives talks all over the world on his work, the pragmatics of knowledge art and on contemporary innovation.
 

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