Introduction in Wearable Computing / Introduction in Activity Recognition

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a Guest Lecture given by Kristof Van Laerhoven

DATE: Thursday, October 15th, 2009
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-004, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 13.30

ABSTRACT:
Introduction in Wearable Computing
This lecture will give an overview of the history and principles of wearable computing, in which people carry various wearable versions of the common desktop computer with them -- with versions of keyboard, mouse, processor, memory and displays on their clothes and sometimes even as their clothes. Many concepts of wearable computing research seem to belong in science fiction movies rather than research, but this field has progressed considerably since its start about 15 years ago. This little brother of the more popular Ubiquitous Computing or Pervasive Computing fields is nevertheless full of promising areas, some of which have grown into products and core computer paradigms already.

Introduction in Activity Recognition
This lecture will give a peek into how researchers are looking for an automatic way to let a computer answer the age-old question: "what are you doing?". In this research, people are given wearable sensors that capture information on how they physically move, and correlate this to activities such as "walking", "running", "playing piano", etc. .  
Applications range from fitness monitors like in recent Nintendo DS programs, to specialized medical monitoring of patients 'in vivo', as they go through their daily life. Students will learn the very basic concepts of machine learning through this application, and can experiment with their own data.

BIO:
Kristof got his Masters degree from the University of Brussels, Belgium, and his PhD from Lancaster University, UK. After his Phd, he worked as a post-doc at the TU-Darmstadt, Germany, where he was recently awarded with an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Research Foundation, to start his own independent research group. He worked on a large number of national projects in Belgium, the UK, and Germany, as well as numerous EU-funded projects and occasionally acts as expert in EU calls, in mobile and wearable computing. He is a program committee member of -- among others -- the International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive) and the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) since the last few years.
His main interests are in the use of machine learning techniques on sensory data, with practical applications in ubiquitous computing and wearable computing, building systems that are deployable in real-world unpredictable situations, rather than in simulation or controlled lab trials. His core research challenges in these are adopting machine learning techniques in embedded sensors and sensor networks.

HOST: Prof. Marc Langheinrich