[ale] ALE April Speaker

[Eric Z. Ayers]

ALE'ers,

I'm trying to line up Anind Kumar Dey to speak at the April 10 Linux
meeting.  Anind is a Gradutate Student at GA Tech who is doing research
on wearable computers.  Here's a e-mail he sent to me about his project
- I thought you might be interested.

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 Let me tell you what I have:
	
	486 - 33 MHz PC w/16 MB RAM loaded with DOS and Linux
	I have a Twiddler (chord keyboard with "inertial" mouse)
	For a display, I'm using Virtual I/O glasses (designed for very
		low end virtual reality, and for games)

	My research is in context-aware computing, in particular, combining
augmented reality (some reality, some virtual) and mobile computing.  Hence,
the wearable computer.

	Problem I'm having now is the display is awful.  When in shell mode,
the font is so hard to read, it's almost useless.  When I load X-Windows,
I have other problems.  I'm kind of in limbo right now.  I'm waiting for 
another display but I'm not sure when it's coming.

	I don't have any web pages about the wearable computer in particular.
The wearable computer was constructed with the help of a PhD student visiting
from MIT.  Their wearable web pages provide a lot more information:
http://www-white.media.mit.edu/vismod/demos/affect/AC_research/wearables.html
http://wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/augmented-reality.html
http://wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/

	The last URL has sections on hardware and Linux software.

	The kinds of applications we're interested in developing at Tech are
navigation-based.  Apps that are aware of a person's orientation, focus,
position, past activities, preferences (and other context), and present
interesting information, and useful suggestions to a user.  We're investigating
voice only input (chord keyboard too difficult for first-time users), pen-based
input, tablet based output, VR glasses output.  Some related projects are
CyberGuide (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/cyberguide), Savoir (Somewhat assisted
voice only interfaction research - no web page yet), and CyberDesk
(http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/cyberdesk).

	That's a quick summary of what we're doing.  Unfortunately, until
I get a better display, there's not too much to demo.  Perhaps it would be 
best to wait until we've made more progress.  But you know your user group
better, so you can make the decision.

	By the way, where did you hear about the wearable computer?

	Anind.