NPUC 1999 Speakers

Ted Selker

IBM Almaden Research Center

Where We Are, What We Touch, and What We Do

Abstract:

Computers first became known to society as the machines that businesses and governments used to catalogue and store financial and personal data. People worry about how this information gets used . The Social use of computers is now helping people find things, entertainment and even each other. Our relationships are by definition personal. But computers will soon know more about our personal relationship and and job fits than we do. Does such use of computer diminish our human qualities? We have always built tools to further what we can see, build and do. Our personal power is surely not diminished by sleeping somewhere in a high-tech sleeping bag or house without which we would have frozen or by wearing protective equipment on the football field that allows us to take blows that would otherwise break bones or worse.

Throughout history, man has strived to do and produce more with less and less effort. Computers are now replacing many physical things with conceptual bits, thus reducing the personal effort needed to make things happen. The drive to increase one's personal power and leverage seems to be a basic element of human nature.

Brief Biography:

Dr. Ted Selker is an IBM Fellow, a Visiting Professor at MIT Media Lab and a Stanford University Consulting Professor. He is responsible for creating the User Systems Ergonomics Research (USER) Laboratory at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

USER explores cognitive, graphical and physical interfaces as well as agent intermediaries. USER's work is available in Thinkpads, TrackPoint Keyboards, ScrollPoint Mouse and KidDesk (from Edmark). Dr. Selker's designs include the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device, which derives its pointing advantages from a behavioral/motor-match algorithm, and the ThinkPad 755CV, a notebook computer that doubles as an LCD projector. He also created the "COACH" adaptive agent that improves user performance, the basis for Smart Guides adaptive teaching agent in OS/2.