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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. ****************** 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.