0 Make IT Matter!

This afternoon lunch keynote was by Gregory Abowd at Georgia Tech. "Gregory D. Abowd (pronounced AY-bowd) is the Distinguished Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests lie in the intersection between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. Specifically, Dr. Abowd is interested in ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) and the research issues involved in building and evaluating ubicomp applications that impact our everyday lives. (from his website)"

He first described a few projects his students were working on:

CareLog
- collecting rich behaviorial data in the unstructured natural environment; retroactively saving important video
- trying to determine the reason for 'bad' behavior to create a behavior intervention plan. Schools cannot afford a behavior specialist ..... so how can we use computer technology? You put cameras in the room (activated by a human cue) and after-the fact capture and annotate the video.

Video capture and annotation (by human) to support richer reflection on behavior that a group of people can reflect on. Allows you to infer or make decisions about what is going on and monitor particular interventions.

Technologies for Early Detection
If diagnosed early enough, the impact of therapies can have a greater impact. The CDS has a campaign - "Learn the signs Act Early." First diagnosis are made several years after the first warning signs so the goal of this project is to help parents see and report warning signs. How to address parent reporting & direct observation? How can parents more accurately track the developmental progress of their child/ren (in a natural way)? For example, most parents keep a baby calendar or smart baby monitor.

Can the objects a child plays with inform you about the level of play of that particular child? (Instrumental objects)

Using play interactions between child and parent, what behaviors can we observe? (Smart Video filtering)

Technology & Health
Good news, if you get hit by a bus, you'd want to be in the USA, but if you have any other kind of chronic condition, we are 'embarrassingly' behind the world. In lower socio-economic status(SES) communities, pediatric asthma is found in up to 1 in 4 people for lower SES communities. One approach he discussed is automated monitoring of lung capacity on your laptop or cellphone (Shwetak Patel). Ultimately, he made the argument that using a cellphone is much more accesible than the $30 monitors on the market.

Interesting, huh...

Technology & Sustainability
Lots of scientists are doing work on 'sensing.' The sensors are embedded in places to learn human behaviors. Dr. Abowd argued that it is not practical to purchase 100 sensors for your home. "Lets aspire to a more 'ubiquitous' approach." Two current approaches he described were distributed direct sensing (DDS) and Infrastructure Mediated Sensing (IMS). For example, when you flick a switch, you cause a noise pattern to be caused along the line. You can sense the noise pattern by detecting the voltage transient along the power line. If you place a sensor on the pattern line, can you determine the different light switches being turned on? YES. This idea can be applied to other domains. Noise is being used as a signal to detect behavior. When we think about 'green' computing, how do we make these technologies scale so that it can be used everywhere.

Activity recognition = sensing + perception

Conservation = sensing + feedback + behavior change


At the end, Dr. Abowd made an important point about diversity in computing. That the students are doing work related to their environments and issues. For example, he asked the question 'do you see a trend here?' He showed pictures of students and their research areas. Under the topic "African Americans and nutrition" of the about 6 pictures displayed, there were about 4 African American (primarily women) who were pictured.

This was a great keynote!!!