Abstract: The world is changing faster than we can predict. The concept of ubiquitous computing that was first voiced 30 years ago is now here, with the introduction of location-based services (LBS) on commodity mobile phones. To conduct research in ubiquitous computing, we no longer have to provide special purpose devices to people - they carry them already. However, despite the widespread use of simple context-aware services such as LBS, there is still much room for improvement. Context-aware systems attempt to infer human intent and adapt to that intent, however, at best, they can only approximate human intent. That approximation results in all sorts of usability problems.

In this talk, I will discuss the usability problems that result from trying to build sophisticated, real-world context-aware applications that attempt to infer human intent. I will show examples of systems that have succeeded and failed, and discuss the role of machine intelligence in designing good context-aware systems. Finally, I will discuss new types of interfaces, algorithms and support that such applications need to have to support real human activities.

Bio: Anind K. Dey is an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His interests lie at the intersection of human-computer interaction, machine learning and ubiquitous computing. He has spent the last decade developing techniques for building context-aware applications, and for improving the usability of such applications. Anind is the author of over 100 articles in the area of ubiquitous computing, has served as the Program Chair for several conferences on ubiquitous computing and serves on the editorial board for IEEE Pervasive Computing and the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal. Before joining Carnegie Mellon University, Anind was a Senior Researcher at Intel Research Berkeley and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of California-Berkeley. He holds a PhD and a Masters degree in Computer Science, as well as a Masters degree in Aerospace Engineering, all from Georgia Tech, and a Bachelors of Computer Engineering from Simon Fraser University.

Web: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~anind/