CITRIS Research Exchange: Participatory Urbanism: Empowering Everyday Civic Engagement and Promoting Wonderment

• February 14, 2007: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
• Location: 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building, the Maria & Dado Banatao Conference Room, UC Berkeley

Participatory Urbanism: Empowering Everyday Civic Engagement and Promoting Wonderment
Eric Paulos [Research Scientist, Intel Berkeley]

12:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 14 in 290 HMMB, UC Berkeley

View talk online

Part of the CITRIS Research Exchange at UC Berkeley. The complete schedule for the spring semester is online at RE-Spring2007. Sponsored by Infineon Technologies.

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Abstract:
Our mobile devices are more than just personal communication tools. They are globally networked, speak the lingua franca of the city (SMS, Bluetooth, MMS), and are becoming the dominant urban processor.  We need to shatter our understanding of them as phones and celebrate them in their new role as measurement instruments. Our desire is to provide our mobile devices with new "super-senses" and abilities by enabling a wide range of physical sensors to be easily attached and used by anyone, especially non-experts. This talk will present earlier foundation work in the field of Urban Computing and address an important new shift in mobile device usage'from communication tool to "networked mobile personal measurement instrument". We explore how these new "instruments" enable entirely new participatory urban lifestyles and create novel mobile device usage models.

Biography:
Eric Paulos is a Senior Research Scientist at Intel in Berkeley, California where he leads the Urban Atmospheres project - challenged to use innovative methods to understand society and the future fabric of our emerging digital and wireless public urban landscapes and lifestyles. Dr. Paulos's research interests span a deep body of work in Urban Computing, Social Telepresence, Robotics, Tangible Media, and Intimate Computing.

Dr. Paulos received his Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley, where he researched scientific and social issues surrounding internet-based telepresence, robotics, and mediated communication tools. During that time he developed several internet based tele-operated robots including Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs) and Space Browsing helium filled tele-operated blimps.

 

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