John Canny's Home Page

Current Research:

	BID: The Berkeley Institute of Design. BID is a new research program about design in the era of pervasive technology. The BID lab is a 4000 sq ft space in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building with researchers from CS, ME, Education, Art Practice, SIMS and architecture. The program covers activity-oriented design of workspaces, products and information systems.
	MILLEE: Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies, aims to improve "power language" literacy in developing regions. In most developing regions, literacy is a major key to opportunity, and the power language is often different from the learners first language. School learning is often problematic and PCs are as yet rare in these contexts, so MILLEE uses cell phones as the platform. MILLEE experiences are game-like and support anytime/anywhere learning, even for children who spend many hours a week working.
	PACT stands for Pattern-Annotated Course Tool. PACT is intended as a fast-track to next-generation learner-centered courses. Learner-centered classrooms are radically different from traditional ones, with learning based on carefully crafted and organized activities. PACT exposes the essential knowledge instructors need to create these courses through pedagogical patterns. It supports authoring courses, customizing them while preserving their pedagogical principles, and eventually the creation and sharing of new pedagogical patterns.
	Glaze is developing design methods for location-based services. The goal is to support rapid development and customization of location applications via technology probes, using a simple noun-verb interface. Our hypothesis is that LBSes should support small and large quanta of functionality, and design methods should support both. We want to support a flexible "design hierarchy" from originating designer through other "customizers" through to the end user.
	SIMILE is focused on natural speech interfaces for users in developing regions. In this project, we are developing a large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognizer for smart phones to enable new forms of interaction. Our first application is to speech-based language learning in the MILLEE project. Beyond that we hope to explore localized services with maximum economic impact in developing regions.
	SmartSpace uses audio information to localize users in the BID lab. A large array of microphones in the ceiling provides a signal that is separated into spatially distinct sources (usually people speaking in the room). Eventually the goal is to use speech input from each source to drive a recognizer which will allow voice commands to control the room. For now it provides a real-time visualization of speaker location and volume.
	Health Monitor: A wireless sensor for chronic and general wellness monitoring. Collects traditional vital signs such as ECG, SPO2, temp, as well as stress markers: EMG, GSR and movement. Designed to track chronic conditions, support differential diagnosis, and to discover predictors for a variety of health problems.

Archived Projects

Publications:

In reverse chronological order

Grouped by topic

Journals, Conferences and Workshops:

Editorial Board member for ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
EB member for IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine
I was a program committee member for CHI 2005, CHI2007, CHI2008 and CHI2010
PC member for ICTD 2006, ICTD 2007, ICTD 2009, ICTD 2010
PC member for ACM DEV 2010
I organized the Mobile Applications Workshop in May 2006 on the Berkeley campus.
Ubicomp Privacy Workshops: I co-organized workshops on Privacy at UBICOMP 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. The first workshop was titled Socially-Informed Design of Privacy-Enhancing Solutions in Ubiquitous Computing, the second was Ubicomp communities: Privacy as boundary negotiation, the third was: Ubicomp Privacy: Current status and future directions., and the fourth was  Privacy in Context.