SPEAKER: Dr. Daniel Wigdor
AFFILIATION: Dynamic Graphics Project, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto

TITLE: Architecting an Interface for the Natural User

ABSTRACT:
Emerging technologies provide platforms for new devices, applications, and 
user interfaces. These technologies have shown potential in early research, 
but their true utility and measures of success lie in their ability to reflect 
and enhance the capabilities of the people who use them. My research seeks to 
address this problem by thoroughly examining and understanding humans, hardware,
and software to create tools that enable users in new ways and meet real needs.
In this talk, I will discuss both sides of the coin: the potential, and the 
limitations of emerging input technologies that require fundamentally different 
user interface designs to realize their full utility. With particular focus on 
the area of multi-touch and surface computing, I will describe how leveraging 
and mirroring human motor, cognitive, and social abilities and needs can 
produce interfaces that are both learnable and enabling of high bandwidth 
communication between the user and the computer. Further, such leverage and 
reflection also ensures that the resulting tools solve real problems and enable 
their users in ways that a traditional mouse-based user interface do not.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:
Daniel Wigdor is an assistant professor of computer science and co-director of 
the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto, and is also an 
affiliate of the School of Applied Science and Engineering at Harvard 
University. Before joining the faculty at U of T in 2011, Daniel was 
a researcher at Microsoft Research, the user experience architect of the 
Microsoft Surface, and a company-wide expert in Natural User Interfaces. 
Simultaneously, he served as an affiliate assistant professor in both the 
Department of Computer Science & Engineering and the Information School at the 
University of Washington. Prior to 2008, he was a fellow at the Initiative in 
Innovative Computing at Harvard University, and conducted research as part of 
the DiamondSpace project at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. He is also the 
co-founder of Iota Wireless, a startup dedicated to the commercialization of 
his research in mobile-phone gestural interaction.

Daniel is the co-author of Brave NUI World | Designing Natural User Interfaces 
for Touch and Gesture, the first practical book for the design of touch and 
gesture interfaces. He has also published dozens of other works as invited 
book chapters and papers in leading international publications and conferences, 
and is an author of over two dozen patents and pending patent applications. 
Further information, including publications and videos demonstrating some of 
his research, can be obtained from www.dgp.toronto.edu/~dwigdor.