T.V. Raman

Google Research

Abstract

User interface is about capturing the user's intent and, having computed the desired response, capturing the user's attention to communicate the result. Today’s mobile devices sport a rich collection of I/O peripherals. As a consequence, they far exceed laptop and desktop computers with respect to their ability to sense the environment and communicate with the user. Realizing that the user interface is but a means to an end, this raises the question:

 

As devices get better with respect to sensing and communicating, how can we design user interfaces that essentially disappear into the background? Said differently, how can we design user interfaces that blend into the user's current mode of working, e.g. eyes-free interaction while driving, rather than forcing users to change their behavior to match a given user interface?

Further, with the ability to off-load computationally heavy tasks to the cloud while leveraging ever-more powerful clients to communicate with the user, we can now build end-user solutions that would have been the realm of science-fiction only a few years ago.

 

This talk will explore these ideas in the context of our work on eyes-free interaction on Android.

Bio

A native of India, T.V. Raman came to Cornell in 1989 and completed his PhD in CS at Cornell in 1994. His dissertation, “Audio System for Technical Readings”, won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He did research at DEC, Adobe Systems, and IBM Research and has been a Research Scientist at Google Research since 2005. His objective has been to develop technologies that drive the future of the Web toward eyes-free, ubiquitous information access. Toward this end, he has authored 3 books, filed 50 patents, and worked on various committees innovating and setting standards for the Web. His work on eyes-free interaction and auditory interfaces has been profiled in leading publications including the NY Times and Scientific American.

4:15pm

B17 Upson Hall

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Refreshments at 3:45pm in the Upson 4th Floor Atrium

 

Computer Science

Colloquium

Fall 2010

www.cs.cornell.edu/events/colloquium

Toward Eyes-Free User Interaction —

Leveraging The Cloud For Ubiquitous Access