Ubicomp and health: Merging research agendas

This week's Information Science Colloquium speaker is Gregory Abowd, a Regents' and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Title: Ubicomp and health: Merging research agendas

Abstract: Ubiquitous computing is often understood as the third generation of computing. It is mainstream and permeates our everyday lives. Mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies have and will continue to have a dramatic impact on many application areas in our everyday lives. In this talk, I will explore a particular domain, health, and how ubicomp research can impact, and in turn be impacted by a focus on health. 

There is an interesting continuum of applications research in health, ranging from straightforward use of existing commercial technologies to the innovative development of new technologies and computing techniques.

Through a number of examples from our research at Georgia Tech, I will explore some of the opportunities, and challenges, of doing health-oriented research (and by extension any kind of applications-oriented research) as a ubicomp researcher.  I will also speculate on what the coming fourth generation of computing might bring and how it might impact applications research.

Bio: Gregory D. Abowd is a Regents' and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1994. His research is in applications of mobile and ubiquitous computing in everyday settings. While he has done work in classroom and office settings, most of his work over the past 15 years has been in home and health settings.  Dr. Abowd is an ACM Fellow and a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy. He received a B.S. in Mathematics (1986) from the University of Notre Dame and M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the University of Oxford