Carnegie Mellon University's Tech Bytes series gives alumni and friends a special glimpse into the innovative and educational programs and research being conducted at the university. Tech Bytes features Carnegie Mellon speakers describing these initiatives and their impact on our society.

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Carnegie Mellon Tech Bytes
Thursday, November 21, 2002
6 - 8 p.m.
Sheraton Palo Alto
625 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, CA 94301

"Mobile Devices for Control"
Brad A. Myers, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Please RSVP by November 18 to bayarea-alumni@andrew.cmu.edu or call 1-800-226-8258 between 8 and 5 p.m. EST.

Schedule

Abstract
With today's and tomorrow's wireless technologies, such as IEEE 802.11, BlueTooth, RF-Lite, and G3, mobile devices will frequently be in close, interactive communication. Many environments, including offices, meeting rooms, automobiles, and classrooms, already contain many computers and computerized appliances, and the smart homes of the future will have ubiquitous embedded computation. When the user enters one of these environments carrying a mobile device, how will that device interact with the immediate environment? We are exploring, as part of the Pebbles research project, the many ways that mobile devices such as Palm Personal Organizers or Pocket PC / Windows CE devices, can serve as a useful adjunct to the "fixed" computers in the user's vicinity. This brings up many interesting research questions, such as how to provide a user interface that spans multiple devices which might be in use at the same time? How will users and the system decide which functions should be presented in what manner on what device? Can the user's mobile device be effectively used as a "Personal Universal Controller" to provide an easy-to-use and familiar interface to all of the complex appliances available to the user? Can communicating mobile devices enhance the effectiveness of meetings and classroom lectures? This talk will provide our preliminary observations on these issues, and will include demonstrations of some of our systems that we are using to investigate them. For more information, see http://www.pebbles.hcii.cmu.edu.

About the Speaker
Brad A. Myers is a Senior Research Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the principal investigator for the User Interface Software Project, the Demonstrational Interfaces Project and the Natural Programming Project. He is the author or editor of over 200 publications, including three books, and he is on the editorial board of five journals. He has consulted for over 40 companies on user interface design and implementation. Myers received a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto where he developed the Peridot UIMS. He received the MS and BSc degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during which time he was a research intern at Xerox PARC. From 1980 until 1983, he worked at PERQ Systems Corporation. His research interests include user interfaces, hand-held computers, programming languages for kids, User Interface Development Systems, Programming by Example, Visual Programming, interaction techniques, window management, and programming environments. He belongs to SIGCHI, ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

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