Janet van der Linden
Janet is a senior lecturer in the Computing Department at the Open University and head of the Pervasive Interaction Lab. With a background in the social sciences, artificial intelligence and Java programming, she is interested in interdisciplinary research. The focus of her research is on novel wearable technologies and how people can use these to augment everyday activities. Her research approach focuses on ‘in the wild studies’ with different groups of users, including professional violin players, young children and blind and sighted members of an audience in an immersive theatre and people exploring a cemetery in a cultural heritage project.
Sheep Dalton
Sheep is a lecturer at the Open University. With a background in computing and architecture, he recently completed his Eng D. in Virtual Environments, Imaging & Visualisation at University College London. His interests are in ubiquitous computing and the interaction between technology, users and space.
Yvonne Rogers
Yvonne is the former director of the Pervasive Interaction Lab and is now the director of UCLIC. She is a visiting professor in the Computing Department at the Open University and an adjunct professor in the school of Informatics at Indiana University (US). She worked for over 10 years in the interdisciplinary school of COGS at Sussex University and has also spent time working at Apple, Stanford University, University California San Diego, and the University of Queensland. Her research is concerned with how to augment and extend everyday, learning and work activities using a diversity of technologies.
Clara Mancini
Clara is a HCI Research Fellow interested in both human and nonhuman animal-computer interaction, with a view to expanding the boundaries of interaction design and promoting inter-species relationships. Her research investigates how computing technology can afford, mediate and shape new models of communication and interaction, supporting novel forms of intra- and inter-species connectedness, learning and cooperation. Previously she worked on the PRiMMA (Privacy Rights Management in Mobile Applications) project, including work on novel empirical methods to investigate the relation between mobile technology and privacy and to inform requirements for privacy-aware mobile systems.
Anijo Mathew
Anijo Mathew is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. After his professional BArch from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, he went on to complete an MDesS from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is currently writing up his PhD at the Open University, that is exploring the intersection of computing and design.
Stefan Kreitmayer
Stefan is a PhD student at the Open University. He is writing his thesis on how computer simulations can be designed for learning in large groups (e.g., classrooms) using shareable interfaces and ambient displays.
Richard Morris
Richard is finsihing his PhD. He is now an XD consultant at ThoughtWorks. His background is based in psychology and he has experience in the IT industry. His research interests are shareable interfaces and data visualisation.
Nadia Pantidi
Nadia is finishing her PhD. She is now a research associate at the Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham. Her background is based primarily in cognitive psychology and also in intelligent systems and technologies. Her research interests are shareable interfaces and HCI.
Associates
Nicola Yuill
Nicola Yuill is a Senior Lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Sussex, where she directs the ChaT Lab, and a visiting Senior Lecturer at the OU. Her main research focus is on theory of mind, communication and language comprehension in typical and atypically developing children. She has a particular interest in using developmental theory to understand and support social cognitive development in education, as, for example, in the Riddles project.
Anne Adams
Anne has a background in Educational Technology, HCI and Social Sciences. Her expertise is in collaborative and secure systems for work-based learning. She is interested in the development of equitable technological systems that support social inclusion. She is a member of the OU Institute for Educational Technology (IET) and works with the 'Accessibility in Educational Media' (AEM) group. She is the PI on a recently funded 250K EPSRC "In the Wild" grant "Out there and in here: social inclusion through distributed team collaboration"
Simon Holland
Simon is a Senior Lecturer in the Computing Department at the Open University. He has a background in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, Mathematics, Music, Learning Technology, and Foundations of Programming. His current main research interests are Pervasive Interaction and Music Computing. He founded the Open University's Music Computing Lab and is its Director. He is Co-I on the E-sense Project. He has devised numerous human-centred computing techniques and systems including Harmony Space, the Haptic Drum Kit, the Audio GPS, and Direct Combination.
Visitors and former members
Jon Bird
Jon was the research fellow on the e-sense and the Change projects. His role was to design and build the vibrotactile interfaces and software. He has a DPhil in artificial life from the University of Sussex and specialises in interdisciplinary research. He previously worked on the Drawbots project at Sussex with computer scientist Phil Husbands, philosopher Maggie Boden and artist Paul Brown. This research used evolutionary robotics to investigate creativity.
Vaiva Kalnikaitė
Vaiva was a visiting research fellow on the CHANGE project. She studies how people use various digital technologies to interact, collaborate or manage their information and uses this understanding to design devices that better fit into the fabric of everyday life. She is particularly interested in the design of digital devices that help people manage their quotidian memories (aka lifelogging) and is currently researching how ambient technologies can infuse behavioural change. She has also worked at MSRC, PARC, King's College London, and GE.
Rose Johnson
Rose is a third year PhD student at UCLIC working on pervasive technologies to help people learn music. She has an MPhys in Theoretical Physics (Swansea University). She is also a visting student at the OU.
Estefanía Martín
Estefanía is doing a research stay at the Pervasive Interaction Lab. She is directly involved in the Discover Project, and collaborates in the OTIH project as well. She works as associate professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain. Her research interests are adaptive hypermedia, user modelling, recommender systems, collaborative systems, and mobile environments. She has worked in several research projects related to adaptive hypermedia and its application to learning environments since 2002. Nowadays, she is involved on learning projects that involve user people with cognitive disabilities using tabletops and mobile devices. More details and publications can be found at http://www.escet.urjc.es/~emartin.
Pablo A. Haya
Pablo is a research visitor on the lab. He is directly involved in Discover project and collaborates in the OTIH project project as well. His research interests currently focuses on developing technologies that support people with cognitive disabilities in their daily life, particularly centre on Human Computer Interaction applied to Ubiquitous Computing. Prior to visiting the OU Pablo completed a PhD in Computer Science Engineering and Telecommunications in the University Autónoma of Madrid in 2006.
In Spain, he works as a full-time teacher in the School of Engineering of the UAM, and as a full-time researcher in the AmILab (Ambient Intelligence Laboratory). More details and publications can be found at http://amilab.ii.uam.es
Paul Marshall
Paul was a research fellow on the ShareIT project and was also involved in the e-sense project. His research interests centre on the use of novel interfaces and representations for learning and working, particularly focusing on ubiquitous and tangible interaction. Prior to joining the OU Paul completed a PhD as part of the Equator project in the Interact Lab at Sussex University, which investigated the use of tangible interfaces for learning. Paul is now a research fellow on the Participation in Healthcare Environment Engineering Programme at Warwick University
Jeff Rick
Jeff was a Research Fellow on the ShareIT project. His primary role on the project was as technologist - designing and implementing novel pervasive computing applications. His background is in educational and collaborative technologies. He was the lead developer of Swiki, the first wiki developed for educational research. For his dissertation, he designed and implemented AniAniWeb, a personal-homepage system built on a wiki foundation, and studied its adoption by graduate students, a particularly relevant group of early adopters. In May 2007, he received a PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jeff is now a faculty member of the Department of Education Technology at Saarland University in Germany.
Ashraf Khalil
Ashraf Khalil is an Assistant Professor at Abu Dhabi University with a PhD from Indiana University in Bloomington, USA. His research interests are pervasive computing, social and mobile computing, persuasive computing, human computer interaction and privacy.
Ashraf visited the lab during the summer of 2010 to collaborate on the CHANGE project. He worked on designing a prototype for the Tidy Street project where he investigated how residents of the street can collaboratively enhance their energy consumption habits to minimize the load on the national grid. Ashraf maintains his collaboration with the project. He believes technology should not be confined to the work environment but should be woven into every aspect of our daily lives.
Richie Hazlewood
William R. Hazlewood is a PhD student in the School of Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington focusing on Human-Computer Interaction and Design. He visited the lab in Spring/Summer 2009. His research interest center around the design, use, and evaluation, of ambient information technologies, particularly those that are not specifically task-based, and are situated in everyday living. His current advisers include Yvonne Rogers from the Open University, UK as well as Erik Stolterman and Kay Connelly at Indiana University, US. William is also the manager of the E.T.H.O.S. Lab at Indiana University, where he assists in the construction of prototypes for studying issues of privacy and security in elder care.
Erwin Schoonderwaldt
Erwin recently completed a PhD (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) that investigated violin playing, in particular: bow-string interaction; the physics of the bow; and bow control by the player. As part of this research he used optical motion capture technologies and developed visualisation techniques. He has been involved in research projects that developed software for music education.
Susanna Hertrich
Susanna is a designer, artist and researcher. For the past ten years, she worked in academic, artistic, research and commercial environments. Her work explores how novel technologies could impact on individuals and society. Currently, her work is centered around the idea of the body as interface and the potential of extrasensory devices to act as prostheses for missing human instincts.
Danielle Wilde
Danielle was a visiting Research Fellow on the e-sense project during February and March 2009 funded by a Ubicomp Grand Challenge Early Career exchange. She is an artist and design researcher based at Monash University Faculty of Art and Design (Melbourne, Australia) and the CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering (Belmont, near Geelong). She is undertaking practice-based doctoral research, investigating how interactive technology in, on and around the body might be used to poeticise experience. Wilde's research sits at the nexus of performance, fashion, fine art, critical (technology) and interaction design.
Eva Hornecker
Eva joined the lab as a Visiting Research Fellow financed by a German research grant and closely collaborated with the ShareIT project. She is now at lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, but maintains her Visiting Research Fellow status at the OU.
In previous lives, Eva has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Interact Lab in Sussex University as part of the Equator project, an acting lecturer in media informatics and interaction design in Vienna (AT) and in New Zealand, and received a Dr.Ing. in her home country Germany from the University of Bremen on how tangible interfaces support collaboration. Her research interests are in 'beyond the desktop interaction design', user-centered UbiComp, participatory design, tangible interaction, and social interaction in co-present situations.
Kay Connelly
Kay is an assistant professor at Indiana University, investigating health and wellness technologies in everyday environments. She visited the lab as part of the Bridging Fellowship Programme funded by the Ubicomp Grand Challenge. Her work with the lab investigated cultural differences in attitudes towards technology in the homes of elders intended to help maintain independence. She conducted a series of focus groups and interviews with elders and their informal caregivers.
Dagmar Kern
Dagmar is a researcher and PhD student in Albrecht Schmidt's research group at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She spent March 2008 working as a visiting research assistant in the Pervasive Interaction Lab funded by a Ubicomp Grand Challenge Early Career exchange. During her visit she prototyped and evaluated a tactile in-car navigation system. This work will be presented in a forthcoming paper at Pervasive 2009.
Maria Luz
Maria spent 6 weeks at the Pervasive Lab helping to plan and analyse tabletop interface studies as part of the ShareIT project. She has a background in psychology.