Time: 4pm Tuesday, March 20
Place: 202 South Hall

                       Joint CS/SIMS Colloquium
                Experiments in Interactive Workspaces
                 Terry Winograd, Stanford University

The concept of ubiquitous computing has been popular for many years, but 
there are still few compelling examples of how to put the ideas into 
practice. There are still many hard questions, both at the systems level 
and at the user interaction level, about how to create a coherent 
information and interaction space that is distributed among many places, 
machines, and users.

We have been developing a testbed called the iRoom, in which we are 
creating the components of an integrated interactive environment for people 
engaged in multi-person work that involves complex visual and information 
structures. We have developed a robust, flexible communications 
infrastructure for integrating devices ranging from workstations and touch 
screens to specialized I/O devices. On top of this infrastructure we have 
explored mechanisms for moving both information and controls across devices 
of different types and scales, and have created some preliminary elements 
of an "overface" that provides cross-platform, cross-device uniformity for 
managing and working in the space.

The talk will describe the overall philosophy and architecture of the 
iRoom, and illustrate with a number of specific application experiments 
that we have begun.

Biography
Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.  He 
has done extensive research and writing on the design of human-computer 
interaction.  His early research on natural language understanding by 
computers was a milestone in artificial intelligence, and he has written 
two books and numerous articles on that topic.  His book, *Understanding 
Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design* (Addison-Wesley, 
1987, co-authored with Fernando Flores), took a critical look at work in 
artificial intelligence and suggested new directions for the design of 
computer systems and their integration into human activity.  He co-edited a 
volume  on usability with Paul Adler, (*Usability: Turning Technologies 
into Tools* Oxford, 1992). His most recent book, *Bringing Design to 
Software* (Addison-Wesley, 1996) brings together the perspectives of a 
number of leading proponents of software design.

At Stanford, Winograd directs the Project on People, Computers, and Design, 
and the teaching and research program on Human-Computer Interaction 
Design.  He is one of the principal investigators in the Stanford Digital 
Libraries project, and the Interactive Workspaces Project. He was a founder 
of Action Technologies, a developer of workflow software, and was a 
founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, of 
which he is a past national president.  He is also on the editorial board 
of several journals, including Human-Computer Interaction, Personal 
Technologies, and Information Technology, and People.