SPEAKER: ROBERT H. THIBADEAU
Laboratory Director, Imaging Systems Laboratory and Senior Research
Scientist, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
ABSTRACT:
SPEAKER BIO:
Experiments with 100 Million People
The Internet connects at least fifty million people to a global
collection of Web sites. The owners of these web sites can watch what
people do with them. This provides the owners with enormous creative
opportunity to quickly and easily test ideas by inventing web sites
around the ideas. This talk will cruise through a number of web sites
that I have architected and speak to what has been learned about using
the Web, not so much as a place to present something, but as a place to
test hypotheses about what is important, how people behave, and what
constitutes effective technologies. For a Universal Library to achieve
its mission, it must thrive amongst the millions. This is an area that
both Raj and I have been working hard to understand.
Robert H. Thibadeau received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the
University of Virginia in 1976, and after stints at Rutgers and Yale,
came to Carnegie Mellon in 1978. In 1981, he was invited to join the
Robotics Institute, and he has since been laboratory director for the
Imaging Systems Laboratory. He has architected a number of systems
including the dollar bill inspection device at the U.S. Bureau of
Engraving, scanning, drawing conversion, and optical character
recognition systems, the GM CAD/CAM systems for headlamp/taillamp
design, radiological treatment planning systems for Nomos, and broadcast
digital information services. More recently he provided the technology
for the Hunt Institute watercolor digitization efforts, the CMU Book
Object now being sold commercially by Xerox, Advanced Digital Library
Resource Centers that introduced the notions of high and low fidelity
access, and Antique Books, a demonstration of full color access to old
books.