There are many urgent problems facing the planet: a degrading environment, a healthcare system in crisis, and educational systems that are failing to produce creative, innovative thinkers to solve tomorrow’s problems. I will illustrate how we are addressing these grand challenges in our research by building systems that balance innovative on-body user interfaces with novel activity inference technology. These systems have helped individuals stay fit, led families to be more sustainable in their everyday lives, and supported learners in acquiring second languages. I will also show how new user interfaces we are designing take a radically different approach, moving the interface off of the human body and into the space around them.

James Landay is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University specializing in Human-Computer lnteraction. Previously, Dr. Landay was a Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech in New York City and prior to that he was a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His current research interests include Technology to Support Behavior Change, Demonstrational Interfaces, Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing, and User Interface Design Tools. He is the founder and co-director of the World Lab, a joint research and educational effort with Tsinghua University in Beijing. Dr. Landay received his BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1990 and MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. His PhD dissertation was the first to demonstrate the use of sketching in user interface design tools. He was previously the Laboratory Director of Intel Labs Seattle, a university affiliated research lab that explored the new usage models, applications, and technology for ubiquitous computing. He was also the chief scientist and co-founder of NetRaker, which was acquired by KeyNote Systems in 2004. From 1997 through 2003 he was a professor in EECS at UC Berkeley. He was named to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2011. He currently serves on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee.