Mike Christel Senior Systems Scientist, Computer Science Dept., Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave, 417 SCRG 213, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Office: 1-412-268-7799, Fax: 1-412-268-5807

Research Interests

I enjoy building systems and conducting research at the intersection of human-computer interaction, multimedia processing, information visualization, and digital libraries. I have worked with digital video since 1987, and have worked on interface development and evaluation for Carnegie Mellon's Informedia digital video understanding research group since its beginning in 1994. Informedia research makes use of speech, image and natural language processing coupled with machine learning and interface design to enable efficient access to relevant video content from large multi-terabyte digital video collections.

My work includes designing and building video surrogate interfaces like thumbnails, storyboards and skims from automatically generated metadata. I wish to enhance access to video libraries so that users can explore meaningful, manipulable overviews of video document sets, issue true multimodal queries, and be aided by automatic, adaptive summarizations of very large amounts of video from heterogeneous distributed sources.

I am a member of CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and use HCI methods to investigate the effectiveness of surrogates and information visualization schemes for video. I believe that interfaces acting as dynamic, interactive summaries across video shots and documents, with support for intelligent browsing, will allow more efficient, effective use of voluminous video resources. I am also interested in automated video content extraction, the educational use of technology, the use of video for synthetic interviews, and the application of Informedia technology to the domains of education and health care. As an example, synthetic interviews of expert physics teachers form a core resource of the NSF-funded Physics Pathway project.

Lists of my publications and invited talks provide more detail about my research. Alex Hauptmann and I have also taught the Multimedia elective in CMU's E-Commerce Master's program since the program began in 1999 (see Fall 2002 Multimedia syllabus for course details).

For brief biographical details regarding my work at the Software Engineering Institute and earlier, see work prior to Informedia research, I received my Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1991, with my thesis examining digital video interfaces for training software engineers about code inspections. I graduated summa cum laude with my B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Canisius College in 1983. While at Canisius I was inducted into the Alpha Sigma Nu honor society, and received Academic All-American honors in 1983 (I ran on the cross country and track teams).

Personal Interests

	My family of course!
	I enjoy my travels with my family; my wife and I have been to all 50 states in the USA, visiting numerous national parks and sites.
	I am a die-hard Buffalo Bills fan living in Steeler Country. So far, Steelers Super Bowl victories: 5, Bills: 0.