Many of you may remember that Andrew Blake's talk last September on "Computer Science and Illusion" - a really excellent and interesting presentation including an overview of the latest technologies currently under development by Andrew and his team at Microsoft Research (MSR). Well, I am very happy to report that we have another visitor from Microsoft Research to the Emerald Isle on the 17th of this month...
Richard Harper is visiting the University of Limerick and he has kindly agreed to give a talk for the Irish developer community on 'The Importance of Place in the Mobile World'. It looks set to be a very interesting discussion on mobile enablement - whether we really want to dissolve all barriers between work/home etc, or whether we actually want technology to allow people create different environments in different places and at different times. And of course, as always, I am dying to see what exciting new technologies are under development in MSR.
Richard is actually over in Ireland visiting Liam Bannon of UL (they are collaborating on European Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Conference (ECSCW'07) which will take place in Limerick in September). Liam and his colleagues deserve a big thank you for helping us organise this community talk!
More details are included below, but you'll find full details on the UL wiki created for the event. When you visit the wiki with the details - just click on 'Register Required' to email Anders and book your place. It's a free event - but we would love to find out how many people are coming along so we can plan the reception properly! :)
Hopefully, see you there!
"The Importance of Place in the Mobile Age"
Professor Richard Harper, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Where and When?
Abstract
"As we move toward networks that can provide ever greater bandwidth, so the vision of working anywhere, anytime and of being in touch anywhere, anytime, seems nearer. For most researchers in the mobile domain, and indeed for most of the businesses operating in the mobile market place, the bonds of space and location are now thought to have been dissolved, more or less. Apart from the perplexing problem of levering location-based series, 'where one is' would no longer appear to matter.
I want to contend, in this talk, that place does matter, but not in the way it mattered twenty or more years ago when mobile researchers - and indeed office systems researchers at PARC and elsewhere - were trying to transcend it. I want to say that now that we have technologies that enable us to transport huge amounts of digital stuff around the world, then what we actually want to turn to at this point in time are investigations of where 'placeness' does matter. I want to suggest that the issue for us, now, is not to redefine location-based services, say; it is rather to re-discover why it is that people leave those settings. I will argue that they leave them to get away from some of the features of these places and therefore they do not want to have these places, as it were, 'follow them around'. Conversely, I will say that people do, often and if not every day, go to a place (such as work) for reasons that are, in large part, to do with some of the features of that place. Being at one place, say a place of work, affords something that being away from the workplace does not. In sum, I want to suggest that, now, in 2006, people do not want technologies that let them dissolve space; instead, they want technologies that support and deepen the very differences that make one place distinct from another. If this is so, then it seems to me that a new research agenda can be pursued, an agenda where place and technology work hand in hand. I will illustrate this claim with some of the technologies we are devising in MSR Cambridge."
Speaker Biography
Professor Richard Harper is Senior Researcher in the Socio-Digital Systems Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge.
He has spent twenty years developing tools and techniques for understanding user behaviour in workplaces, mobile settings and the home.
He has over 140 papers, patents, and books, which include: New Technology and Practical Police Work (1992), Inside the IMF (1998), Organisational Change and Retail Finance (2000), Wireless World (Ed, 2001),The Myth of the Paperless Office,(2002), Inside the Smart Home (Ed, 2003), and most recently, Inside Text: Social and design perspectives on SMS (Ed, 2005). He is currently completing Fieldwork and Design, with Dave Randall and Mark Rouncefield.
Prior to joining MSR Richard was director of various technology innovation companies, including The Appliance Studio and Social Shaping Research. In 2000 he was appointed the UK’s first Professor or Socio-Digital Systems, at the University of Surrey, England. He completed his Phd at Manchester in 1989, prior to joining Xerox EuroPARC in 1992.
Amongst his professional activities, Richard is Editor-in-Chief of the Springer-Kluwer series on CSCW, member of the Colleges of Reviewers for the EPSRC and the ESRC, as well as on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Personal Technologies and the Journal of CSCW.
He lives in Cambridge with his wife and three children.
