Re: 90 minutes with HCI researchers - what would you discuss?

[Hyowon said:]
>> The recurring question in my case has been on how 
>> to take advantage of these newly emerging technologies 
>> in multimedia in order to support the end-users, but the 
>> answers to these have been relatively straightforward 
>> because what the specific multimedia technology is trying 
>> to do is often naturally such that HCI people can take away 
>> and use to solve their problems.  


[Lloyd asked:]
> What brings about this user-centrism?  Is it intended by the
> developers?


I know technology people are notoriously moved away from users or possible usefulness, but they don't just start thinking from nothingness... Surely some initial thoughts about potential use must have got connected to their technical knowledge and triggered their eagerness to investigate.  For example, object detection/tracking in video is one of the major multimedia signal processing areas - automatically detecting the objects and tracking them in video surely will be useful in the end, because that will reduce human's manual searching & monitoring effort (say, in CCTV monitoring).  Once they decided to investigate they go on and on about with macroblocks and spatiograms, but at least the very starting point must have been something to do with its potential usefulness?  I mean when you guys started developing SW technologies, surely you had a vision of why it would be useful?

Hyowon

----------------------------------------------------
Dr Hyowon Lee
Post-doctoral researcher
Centre for Digital Video Processing
Dublin City University
Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland
Tel: +353 -1 -7005829
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~hlee/
Email: hlee@computing.dcu.ie
----------------------------------------------------

Received on Friday, 18 May 2007 12:48:04 UTC