Monday: The robots are coming but not in the way you think... Saving mobile and ubiquitous users from a de-humanising future
Machines cleverer than us; services more intuitive than us; robots more emphatic than us. It's hard being a human in the future. But, there's worse news - we are all training ourselves - one swipe at a time - to become limited versions of the machines we most fear. In this talk, I will present a call to arms suggesting how we can celebrate, nurture and enhance the special qualities we possess as humans, showing that if we do, there is nothing to worry about!
Professor Matt Jones
Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Matt Jones has been working on mobile interaction design for 20+ years. He has written two books on the subject (Mobile Interactions Design, with Gary Marsden; and There's not An App for That, with Simon Robinson and Gary Marsden). His research work has explored a diverse range of mobile topics including small screen browsing; navigation systems; storytelling; digital inclusion; conversational systems; and, deformable devices. He is the Director of one of the UK's national Digital Economy Centres and led on creating the newly opened multimillion pound Computational Foundry - all of these activities but people-first in the pursuit of technological innovation. More at www.undofuture.com.
Wednesday: AR We Kidding Ourselves?
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR / VR) continue to buzz hotly as contenders for the next wave of personal computing. Tech-industry pundits predict enormous future markets reaching hundreds of billions of dollars based on speculation that AR will replace the smartphone. But while VR has a clear entry to market in immersive gaming (and potentially social VR), there are many challenges to AR beyond just making the hardware lightweight and comfortable. What applications are important enough for the mass population to wear a device on their head most of the time? Or can pervasive displays obviate the need for wearable AR headsets? How will we overcome the uncanny valley of non-realistic avatars? Are light-field optics necessary to align digital and physical objects at the same focal distance? And what will it take to make 3D interaction as easy and reliable as mouse and trackpads for 2D? This presentation will explore the challenges and some promising directions to really make AR become a replacement for the smart phone.
Bo Begole
Apple, Sunnyvale, California, USA
Senior Engineering Manager, Augmented Reality UX, Apple
A researcher, inventor and implementer of novel digital experiences, Bo Begole has commercialized products incorporating ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp), mixed reality (MR), 3D input technologies, computer vision (CV), machine learning (ML), mobile recommender systems, 3D / light field streaming, real-time groupware and more. He has held executive and leadership positions at world-class research institutions including Xerox PARC, Apple, Samsung Research, Huawei Research and Sun Microsystems. He is the author of Ubiquitous Computing for Business (FT Press, 2011) and is an author/co-author on dozens of peer-reviewed research papers and press articles (Forbes, Huffington Post, Economist), as well as 37 issued patents and dozens pending. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist for pioneering research in real-time groupware and probabilistic machine learning to predict human behavior and was co-chair of CHI 2015. Dr. Begole received a Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech in 1998. Prior to his studies, he was enlisted in the US Army as an Arabic language interpreter, including service in the peace-keeping mission of the Multinational Force and Observers in Sinai, Egypt.