"Input and Output Outside the Box -- Alternatives to Desktop Computing"
EECS Joint Colloquium Distinguished Lecture Series

Dr. Jennifer Mankoff
Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley

Wednesday, October 3, 2001
Hewlett Packard Auditorium, 306 Soda Hall
4:00-5:00 p.m.

Abstract:

The mouse and keyboard, in combination with standard GUI interfaces such as web browsers, spreadsheets and word-processors have become successful and universally accepted in the last decades. However, as we begin to investigate computing off the desktop, such as with mobile or ubiquitous computing, and to broaden the user base of computers to
include people with disabilities, these interaction techniques start to face problems.

This talk will highlight some of those problems and discuss solutions that I am currently investigating and have developed over the course of the last six years. Topics will include new interaction techniques for severely disabled people for handling very low-bandwidth input, toolkit support for handling recognition errors, ambiguity and other vagaries of alternative input devices, and ambient displays that allow virtual information to have a presence in the
physical world.

Biography:

Jennifer Mankoff joined the EECS faculty this Fall an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, and a member of the Graphics User Interface Research group (GUIR). Her research areas include ubiquitous computing, assistive technology for people with disabilities, and ambient displays.

Jennifer completed her PhD in 2001, at which point she joined the UC Berkeley faculty. She received her Bachelors degree at Oberlin College in 1995, where she graduated with High Honors. In the past eight years, she has interned at two companies (FX Pal (96) and AT\&T Bell Labs (94) (now Lucent Technologies), as well as Argonne National Labs (93) and Carnegie Mellon University (99). She has served on the program committee for the ASSETS conference on Assistive Technology (2000), and as student volunteer chair for UIST 2000. She was an Invited Panelist at ASSETS'97, and participated in the CHI'00 doctoral consortium.

Jennifer is currently organizing a lending library and seminar focussed on avoiding and dealing with Repetitive Strain injuries (RSI), advising students, and beginning to build active projects in several of the research areas she will discuss in these talks.

Home page:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jmankoff