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Joe McCarthy
Title: President and Connector-in-Chief, Interrelativity, Inc. Email: joe@interrelativity.com |
Research OverviewHow can technology help to create, maintain and enhance relationships in the real world? While many researchers are developing technology to support distributed groups and relationships in the virtual world, I have been exploring how technology can help support physically co-located groups. In particular, I am investigating how such support can be provided by an active environment: a physical space that can sense and respond appropriately to the people and activities that take place within it. Our most recent mechanism for creating active environments is through proactive displays: large displays augmented with sensors that can detect people nearby and show content that is contextually appropriate.In addition to my own research work, I
recently chaired
the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp2003),
and co-chaired (with
Elizabeth
Churchill) the ACM 2002 Conference on Computer Supported
Cooperative Work (CSCW 2002). These were enormously
rewarding experiences, but I hereby publicly avow that I will
not be chairing another conference [for a long time] ... though I still do a wee bit of organizing, e.g., as Industrial Liaison (with Elizabeth Churchill) and co-organizer (with danah boyd) of a panel on "Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces" at CSCW 2004.
Proactive Displays
& The Experience UbiComp Project (AutoSpeakerID,
Ticket2Talk, Neighborhood Window): a suite of three
applications running on large, public displays designed to
enhance the awareness and interactions among conference
attendees in three different contexts at a conference (UbiComp
2003). This project was initiated while I was at Intel Research Seattle. The following projects
were conducted while I was at Accenture Technology Labs.
Some of these links take you directly to the project pages at Accenture ... [others are broken]: Ubiquitous Peripheral Displays (UniCast, GroupCast, OutCast): an exploration of a future where video displays will be everywhere, permeating all of our environments, at home, at work, or in public spaces with a special focus on what kinds of content are appropriate in what kinds of contexts. Visual Location Awareness Tools (ActiveMap, EventManager): a suite of tools for creating greater awareness of the location and activities of colleagues within a workgroup, with an aim to provide more opportunities for the kind of informal communication that is increasingly crucial to the success of project- and team-oriented work. MusicFX: a fitness center environment that knows who is working out, what they like to listen to, and dynamically adjusts the music to best suit the group of exercisers at any given time. MediaWatch: a browsable and searchable multimedia database of video recordings of meetings and presentations, indexed automatically using speech recognition, information retrieval and video analysis techniques, providing a new mechanism for the collection and dissemination of knowledge within an organization.
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