Sidney Fels
Title: Human Communication Technologies Research for Expression
For my appeal for research on long-term goals to extend technologies for human cognitive, physical, and emotional expression, I’ll present from over 20 years of research at my Human Communications Technologies Lab. I’ll present how our explorations to create a human voice instrument have led to our efforts on biomechanical modeling of the human body with applications in medicine, linguistics, brain-to-speech interfaces, and music. I’ll also discuss how our investigations to elevate video to be an expressive first-class citizen of media have led to new ways to refer to and interact with video. I’ll delve into our work with new forms of mixed reality using our spherical fish-tank virtual reality display that merges VR with the real world. I’ll provide some insights about interaction design using a theory of interaction aesthetics using reflection, response, control, and belonging.
Sid Fels: (Prof, ECE, British Columbia, 1998-); PhD (CS, Toronto, 1994); MSc (CS, Toronto 1994); BASc (EE, Waterloo, 1988).
Sid is a Distinguished University Scholar at UBC (2004-). He was a visiting researcher at ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan (1996-1997). He worked at Virtual Technologies Inc. in CA(1995). He is internationally known for his work in human-computer interaction, biomechanical modeling, neural networks, new interfaces for musical expression and interactive arts with over 400 scholarly publications. He is a principal investigator of the $22.1M Institute of Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems housing interdisciplinary research. He was a principal investigator on the Canadian Networked Centre of Excellence on Graphics, Animation and New Media (NCE GRAND). He was the Director of MAGIC at UBC (2001-2012). Since 2017, he holds the Dolby Professorship and Midnet Professorship in Digital Multimedia at UBC.