Mik Lamming talk at U of T tomorrow

Mik Lamming, from HP Labs at Palo Alto is giving a talk on Continuously Sensing Human Behaviour in BA 1180 tomorrow at 11 am at U of T. Specifically he's exploring the use of small wireless devices called SPECs that can be embedded on people to continuously sense human context. This is certainly something of interest to me, because one of my research interests is in context awareness. The details and abstract of the talk are described below:

Drug companies, marketeers, HMOs, advertisers, architects, and many others, have strongly held business reasons to learn more about the daily lives of their customers, and users. But as consumers, we yearn to understand more about ourselves: to discover what factors influence our wellness, spending patterns, or progress towards some goal. We all need help to recall details of past events, or to be reminded of things in the future. These are just a few of the things that could be achieved if we could continuously sense our own behavior, and especially if we believed that our data could be kept confidential until we had a compelling reason to share it.

I have been looking at ways to continuously sense my own context and behavior: where I am, who, or what I have near me, and what I am doing. By continuous I mean everywhere I go, all the time - 24x7. I have been tackling three core issues : how to get continuous coverage of my life; how to avoid being snooped upon by Big Brother; and how to make the infrastructure smoothly scale from a single user, to the whole world. I'll present a few things my team learned from our first system.

Recently I have been looking at how these ideas could address the problem of elder care giver burnout, a situation with which I have had personal experience. I'll describe our goal, and the new apparatus we have been building.


Mik Lamming is a Distinguished Scientist at HP Labs Palo Alto. He is exploring how tiny computers can continuously monitor long-term human behavior, but without compromising privacy. He believes this is a crucial key in addressing the everyday information processing needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. He enjoys doing user studies, building prototypes, and then figuring out their shortcomings.
For the past couple of years he has been exploring how swarms of tiny computers called SPECs might reduce the burnout rate for people caring for the elderly at home.
With William Newman is author of the textbook "Interactive System Design".
In '90s he helped found Xerox EuroPARC, and built the Ubiquitous Computing lab. establishing many of the fundamental patents in the field, His team prototyped Forget-me-not a portable prosthetic memory, and Satchel, a tiny ubiquitous document access device.

I will definitely be going to the talk tomorrow, so watch back for updated notes.