Special Assignment: Dr. Celine Latulipe's Lecture

Reference

Title: Building and Evaluating Creative Interaction
Authors: Fabian Hemmert, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany
Date: January 27, 2011
Location: Georgia Tech University, Georgia, USA.

Summary

Dr Latulipe started off by providing a brief introduction and a precise description about her work area. Initially, Dr Latulipe talked about the how pointing devices limit the input to just one hand. For example, we can use only one mouse on a computer at a time. Two pointing devices will confuse the computer. She stresses on the need of having multiple pointing devices and demonstrates how it can be very helpful. She briefly explained about her PhD work in which she designed a photo editing software that supports multiple pointing devices. Two separate pointers were used to control hue and saturation and the curve plotted using these two variable was used to control the contrast and brightness.

Next, she talks about her project Dance Draw that has received some media attention. The project involves the dancers to carry a wireless gyroscopic mouse, which serves as an input device for the software that runs on the computer. The software uses this input to create drawings. This the actions of the dancers is used to create pictures.

Lastly, Dr. Latulipe talks about NASA Task Load Index (TLX) which is widely used in the field of human computer interaction. She has created a Creativity Support Index on the similar lines. In one of the user studies, she studied an audience's reaction while they were watching a creative performance. The data collected can establish a relation between the performance and audience engagement.

Discussion

I thought the talk were extremely interesting, not like the traditional computer science talks that are full of programming jargon and talk about improving the performance improvement. The talk was very easy to understand and focussed on creativity. I believe creativity is extremely important to create intelligent software. Since the final user of any software is human, it's very important to focus on the human side of the software.