Events Calendar

CS Distinguished Lecture: Karon MacLean (University of British Columbia) - Making Haptics and its Design Accessible

Speaker: Karon MacLean, University of British Columbia, Canada

Talk Title: Making Haptics and its Design Accessible

Series: Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series

Abstract: Today's advances in tactile sensing and wearable, IOT and context-aware computing are spurring new ideas about how to configure touch-centered interactions in terms of roles and utility, which in turn expose new technical and social design questions. But while haptic actuation, sensing and control are improving, the difficulties of incorporating them into a real-world design process poses a major obstacle to adoption in everyday technology.

In this talk I'll overview highlights chosen from of an ongoing effort to understand how to support haptic designers and end-users. These include online experimental design tools, DIY open sourced hardware and accessible means of creating, for example, expressive physical robot motions and evolve physically sensed expressive tactile languages, and major community-based studies of design practice.

To accelerate design practice, we put our systems, designs and datasets online. A central and evolving piece of our larger openhaptics effort is Haptipedia, an expert-sourced, community-based browsable visualization of historical haptic inventions as a resource to future designers.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


Biography: Karon MacLean is Professor in Computer Science at UBC, with degrees in Biology and Mechanical Engineering (BSc, Stanford; M.Sc. / Ph.D, MIT) and time spent as a professional robotics engineer (Center for Engineering Design, University of Utah) and haptics / interaction researcher (Interval Research, Palo Alto). At UBC since 2000, MacLean's research specializes in haptic (touch) interaction: cognitive, sensory and affective design for people interacting with the computation we touch, emote and move with and learn from, from robots to handheld devices and the situated environment. MacLean leads UBC's Designing for People interdisciplinary research cluster and CREATE graduate training program (25 researchers spanning 11 departments and 5 faculties - dfp.ubc.ca), is Special Advisor, Innovation and Knowledge Mobilization to UBC's Faculty of Science, and will co-chair ACM UIST (User Interface Software and Technology) in 2020.


Host: Heather Culbertson

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Computer Science Department