Smart Rooms, Smart Clothes to be Topic of Computer Science Lecture at UMass Amherst

Nov. 18, 1997

AMHERST, Mass. - "Smart Rooms, Smart Clothes" will be the topic of the fourth lecture in the 1997-98 Distinguished Lecture Series sponsored by the computer science department at the University of Massachusetts. Professor Alex Pentland, academic head of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will speak on Wed., Dec. 3, in Morrill North, room 329 at 4 p.m. The lecture will be preceded by refreshments at 3:15 p.m. in the atrium outside of the computer science department’s main office in Lederle Graduate Research Center, room A243. The event is free and open to the public.

Pentland’s expertise is in computer systems that can follow people’s actions, recognizing their faces, hand gestures, facial expressions, and learning their preferences and the ways they express themselves. Using this technology, he says, scientists have begun to make "smart rooms" and "smart clothes" that can help people in day-to-day life without chaining them to keyboards, microphones, pointing devices, or special goggles.

"Imagine a house that always knows where your kids are, and tells you when they might be getting in trouble. Or an office that knows when you are in the middle of an important conversation, and shields you from interruptions. Or glasses that can recognize the person you are talking to and whisper their name in your ear," says Pentland. "Do not think that these are just fanciful examples; we have already built prototypes of such systems in the laboratory."

Pentland was recently listed in Newsweek magazine as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape the next century. He has studied computer graphics; artificial intelligence; machine and human vision; and the way human beings interact with computers. His most recent research focus is understanding human behavior in video, including facial expressions, gesture, and intention. Pentland received his Ph.D. from MIT. He then worked at the Stanford Research Institute’s Artificial Intelligence Center, and taught at Stanford University, winning the Distinguished Lecturer award in 1986. In 1987 he returned to MIT to found the Perceptual Computing Section of the Media Laboratory, a group that now includes more than 50 researchers in computer vision, graphics, speech, music, and human-machine interaction.

The final lecture in the series will be offered by Christos Papadimitriou of the University of California, Berkeley, who will speak on "Computational Aspects of Organization Theory," Wed., May 6, 1998. All talks are at 4 p.m. in Morrill North room 329.