Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Sidney Fels

UBC Associate Professor, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering,

Director of Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) and Leader of Human Communications Technologies Laboratory

Research at the Human Communication Technologies Lab:

Interaction, Technology, Art and Expression

Wednesday November 1, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Room 3875, SFU Surrey Campus, third floor Central City Tower in the Research Labs

Abstract

Communication and computing technology is advancing at an accelerated pace. Although this new technology is supposedly made for the benefit of humans, people are finding it difficult to keep up with it. The Human Communication Technology (HCT) Research Laboratory at UBC researches a number of key issues that put people "back in the loop" and allow us to communicate experiences both to computer systems and each other more effectively. An awareness of individual variations in human cognitive, physical, and emotional capabilities provides a foundation for acquiring, analyzing, representing, storing, retrieving, transmitting, communicating, and ultimately, synthesizing human experience. Faster processing machines, larger data capacity, new algorithms, multimedia, and multimodal systems will combine with developments in psychology, sociology, and art to enhance the communication abilities between people and machines. In this talk I will introduce many of the projects that are pursuing advances in Human Communication Technologies, and specifically, a framework I have been developing based on intimacy and embodiment, to understand how people interact with these new technologies and each other. As part of the framework, I consider the aesthetics of relationships as key to describing how people and machines develop intimacy. Supporting the framework are projects that span from engineering to science to art. I will describe some of the projects, including artwork such as: Iamascope and Swimming Across the Pacific, musical work with a two person flute, and research on camera and speech based interfaces.

More info: http://hct.ece.ubc.ca

Biography

Sidney Fels has been in the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia since 1998. Sidney received his Ph.D. and M. Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1994 and 1990 respectively. He received his B. A. Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1988. He was a visiting research at ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan from 1996 to 1997. He is internationally known for his work in human-computer interaction, neural networks, intelligent agents, new interfaces for musical expression and interactive arts with over 100 scholarly publications and exhibitions.

Sidney is one of the principal investigators of the Institute of Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems through his authoring a CFI grant to create a new $22.1M facility to house interdisciplinary research using advanced technologies. He has been the Director of Media Graphics and Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) since 2001.