Extended Utilization of Human Capabilities for Designing Interaction Techniques

Speaker:        Aakar Gupta
                University of Toronto

Title:          "Extended Utilization of Human Capabilities for Designing
                 Interaction Techniques"

Date:           Wednesday, 21 February 2018

Time:           11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:          Room 1504 (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

As newer computing devices vary in their form factors and proximity to the
user, from smartwatches and smartglasses to ultrasized displays and
immersive environments, they limit old and enable new affordances.
However, our interactions still rely on a limited set of our anatomical
capabilities which do not take advantage of these new affordances.

In this talk, I will show how the utilization of human capabilities in
unconventional ways can lead to synergisitc interactions for these new
devices and usage scenarios. I will demonstrate the use of three human
capabilities in particular - finger distinguishability, tactile
perception, and hand dexterity in designing novel interaction models for
touch input, touch output, and touchless interactions respectively. The
work shows how better utilization of human capabilities solves existing
challenges in novel computing scenarios, leads to newer abilities, and
better performance.


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Biography:

Aakar Gupta is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at
University of Toronto, Canada. His work focuses on designing novel
interactive technologies that better utilize human capabilities. He has
won two Honorable Mention Awards at ACM CHI, is a two-time recipient of
the Robert Lansdale and Okino Computer Graphics Fellowship, and received
the MITACS Globalink Research Award in 2016. Aakar has been a research
intern at Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and INRIA. Aakar received his
Masters in Computer Science from University of Toronto in 2012 where he
worked on mobile-based crowdsourcing in low-income regions.