I'm a new Assistant Professor at UMD in CS, a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), and founder of the new HCIL Hackerspace. I make, break, and study stuff for the environment, health, and the city. My talk will include, in one form or another, bicycles, shoes, sidewalks, quadcopters, Legos, and water (I'll talk about the latter two both separately and together) and hopefully convince you that (a) the work is interesting, (b) the work is meaningful, and (c) CS research can look towards solving high value social problems to help innovate and make an impact.
For students taking the seminar for credit: Write down and hand in a small note that contains two sentences (and no more than two sentences): (i) some piece of research or technology that greatly inspired you recently and (ii) why. We will collect this at the beginning of the talk.
Jon Froehlich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). His research focuses on building and studying interactive technology that addresses high value social issues such as environmental sustainability, computer accessibility, and personal health and wellness. Jon earned his PhD from the University of Washington (UW) in Computer Science in 2011 with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) and was advised by Professors James Landay and Shwetak Patel. For his doctoral research, Jon was recognized with the Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2008-2010), the UW College of Engineering Graduate Student Research Innovator of the Year Award (2010), and the UW Distinguished Dissertation Award (2012). His work has been published in many top-tier academic venues including CHI, UbiComp, IJCAI, MobiSys and ICSE garnering a best paper award and two best paper nominations. Jon received his MS in Information and Computer Science in 2004 from the University of California, Irvine where he was advised by Paul Dourish. Learn more at: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~jonf/.