Keynotes

Jinha Lee is a Principal Engineer and Head of Interaction Group at Samsung Electronics. At the intersection of the design and engineering, Lee explores ways to weave digital information into physical space and material, and how people can collaborate better in such environments. He also focuses on innovating software prototyping processes and developing experience-design driven business strategies. Previously, Lee has co-founded Eone - a tactile watch brand for everyone including the visually impaired, conducted research at SONY and Microsoft. He has received his M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and his B.E. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Tokyo. His works have been presented and exhibited at major academic conferences and museums, and have been recognized for design and innovation excellence; MIT Technology Review named him one of the “35 innovators under 35 (TR35)”; FastCompany named him on one of 32 candidates for the greatest living designer in the world; World Economic Forum named him a young global leader. In 2013, he gave a TED talk about his inventions including 3D desktop that allows users to reach inside the screen and a levitating interface.

The title of Jinha's ACM ITS keynote is "From Surface to Space". Humans have evolved to develop sophisticated skills to sense and interact with their physical surroundings; however, the majority of our interaction with digital information nowadays is confined to a single, small, flat screen. In this talk, I will discuss how we can leverage our kinesthetic skills and collaborative nature to enhance interaction with digital data, by representing the data in physical space or on multiple distributed devices. I will highlight some of my recent projects that demonstrate this vision including 3D spatial desktop, levitating interfaces, and a haptic wrist-watch for the visually impaired.

Professor Charles Spence is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory. He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments in the future. His research calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from household products to mobile phones, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live.
In his keynote at ACM ITS Charles will focus on "In touch with the future". It was recently announced that there are now more than three billion touch screens in circulation (Anon., 2015). What such a figure emphasizes, I think, is that touch is becoming an increasingly pervasive feature of our interaction with many technologies, from touch screen to vibrating cars all the way through to vibrating cutlery - really (Gallace & Spence, 2014; Spence & Ho, 2008; Spence & Piqueras-Fiszman, 2014)! But what, exactly, is the advantage, or advantages of engaging this our largest sense? And what are the trade-offs? After all, a quick look at the history of the tactile stimulation of the skin surface resounds with the sound of promises that have gone unfulfilled: Anyone seen the tactile television, or bankers walking around with a vibrating belt communicating the latest stock market figures yet? I thought not! While I believe that effectively stimulating the skin surface holds many promises in the years to come, success in the real-world will only come from a proper understanding of the psychological limitations in tactile information processing, involving everything from tactile sensory suppression whenever we move (see Juravle et al., 2013) through limits on multisensory perception and attention (Gallace & Spence, 2014). In this talk, I will highlight what I see as the biggest limitations of tactile stimulation/communication (Spence, 2014), before looking at some of the latest innovations that have really gotten me excited over the last couple of years in terms of showcasing what the world of digital tactile stimulation can potentially offer.