Gadget guru Ted Selker to speak at CITI lecture Feb. 5

Gadget
guru Ted Selker to speak at CITI lecture Feb. 5

“Mr. Gadget”
Ted Selker is the next featured speaker in the CITI Distinguished
Lecture Series to be held at 4 p.m. Feb. 5. The lecture,
titled “Context-Aware Computing,” will be in McMurtry
Auditorium, Anne and Charles Duncan Hall. A reception in
Martel Hall will follow the lecture.

Selker heads
the Context-Aware Computing Group at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. Part of the MIT Media Lab, the Context-Aware
Group is interested in using “context knowledge”
— what people do, what they have done, where they are
and how they feel about it — to interact with the surrounding
environment. By understanding and using the contextual reality
of a situation, the group hopes to redefine human-computer
interaction. Among the projects the group is working on
are a mug that gives feedback about its contents (e.g.,
the concentration of sugar in a beverage or the freshness
of milk) and a Gesture Ball, which learns a computer-user’s
mental model of how a human-computer interface should work
and modifies itself to meet those expectations.

Selker’s
research has contributed to hundreds of products ranging
from notebook computers to operating systems. He is known
for the design of the “TrackPoint III” in-keyboard
pointing device now found in Compaq, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard,
IBM, Sony, Texas Instruments and other computers; for creating
the “COACH” adaptive agent that improves user
performance (Warp Guides in OS/2); and for the design of
the 755CV notebook computer that doubles as an LCD projector.
While at IBM, Selker built the User Systems Ergonomics Research,
or USER, which is known for creating dozens of product visualizations
in the form of prototypes and products yearly. Selker and
his inventions have received more than 30 awards from publications,
including PC Magazine, Business Week and BYTE.

Prior to joining
the MIT faculty in 1999, Selker worked at IBM’s Almaden
Research Center, where he became an IBM Fellow in 1996.
He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University,
taught at Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts–Amherst
and Brown University and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari
Research Lab. Selker is the author of 17 patents and 20
papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings.