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This episode’s guest is Beth Mynatt, Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. In addition to her pioneering work in Human Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing, she has devoted significant energy in recent years to research administration. In our conversation, we talk about her own research in human-centered health technology, her role facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations at Georgia Tech, and her efforts at the national level as chair of the Computing Community Consortium.

Bio

Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt is the Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), a College of Computing Distinguished Professor, and the Director of the Everyday Computing Lab. The Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) serves as a catalyst for research activities that shape the future of human-centered systems, environments and technologies to promote fulfilling, healthy and productive lives. Dr. Mynatt is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of ubiquitous computing, personal health informatics, computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interface design. Named Top Woman Innovator in Technology by Atlanta Woman Magazine in 2005, Dr. Mynatt has created new technologies that support the independence and quality of life of older adults “aging in place,” that help people manage diabetes and cancer, and that increase creative collaboration in workplaces.  Mynatt is also the Chair of the CRA Computing Community Consortium, an NSF-sponsored effort to engage the computing research community in envisioning more audacious research challenges. She serves as member of the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and as an ACM Council Member at Large. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and a Sloan and Kavli research fellow. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and chaired the CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computer interaction. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998, Mynatt was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC.

Transcript

Andrew Miller:             Beth, thank you for talking with us today. What first got you interested in computer science research?

Beth Mynatt:                I started out in electrical engineering and that was relatively short-lived in my undergraduate days because I became enamored with the concrete problems where computers could do something. It was much less abstract than the kinds of problems I was working on in ECE. Then, at that point, I went to a very fast progression I went through a very fast progression of isn’t artificial intelligence cool, so I was working in that area. I was also working in software engineering understanding how people were trying to build these systems. Then, I discovered HCI and that connected, for me, the difficult part of understanding what makes people tick, and then how to build computing systems that connect, amplify, or somehow engage that in useful ways.

Andrew Miller:             In your research you’ve attacked this from a number of different weight date directions. Your dissertation work was more focused on accessibility and you build the system called Mercator. Would you care to go back in time with me and give us an idea of what to that research was all about?

Beth Mynatt:                It really is going back in time because that was at the point that graphical user interfaces were just starting to appear. You have to go back to the world of … The very first little folder icon on the screen. What happened is I was loosely affiliated with a group that was just playing around with things in multimedia, because that was the term of the day. There were a whole bunch of people that worked as some form of computer users computer programmers who were blind because there were these cool things called screen readers that could take the text on the screen and send it to a braille device or send it to a speaker. The graphical interfaces threatened to do to destroy this entire area of occupation and work because no longer with the information on the screen text, but it was just images. There was no obvious way to translate that information.

That was just too much of a challenging problem for us to ignore. It just sounded like too much fun to work on. We tackled this notion of when you have pictures, when you have a graphical representation what is the best way to convey that for someone who is blind? We very quickly felt that just if you’re scooting the mouse along the screen and it’s saying, folder X and folder Y, and left, right, and up, and down are immaterial that trying to just describe visually what it looked like wasn’t the point. We build a system that got back into the guts of the interface in terms of how information was grouped and what were the interaction mechanisms selecting something, choosing from a list, inter-information in a text box, those little UI widgets that everyone was starting to work with, and then did it on a widget by which it level of how to make that information productively useful for a blank blind computer person who nevertheless it’s working with cited colleagues.

Andrew Miller:             It seems like this idea of designing for those who maybe aren’t considered by the traditional systems as a theme because you then, after some time, at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, which you could definitely talk about, shifted first to studying “aging in place” technologies for older people to remain active in their own homes. Then around, I don’t know, 2008, 2009, or so, switching almost completely into engaging in health and wellness. Do you see that shift? What do you see as the common theme and then where you made a turn?

Beth Mynatt:                I encourage this when I teach classes, as well, which is that people are actually pretty horrible at designing for themselves. And that’s counter-intuitive, but you make too many assumptions, and you don’t delve deeply enough in the problem to get really good design-insights.

And so, one of the best ways to do really good research, and do really good design, is to focus on users who are not you. And to use that as a forcing-function to deeply understand their needs, their goals, the barriers to using computing technology to achieve those goals, and then trying to address it.

So when I came back to Georgia Tech as a faculty member, we had started just the very first few days of the Aware Home Research Initiative. And, again, luckily realized that designing for ourselves in-home environments was not terrifically interesting. But if you looked at user groups who could truly benefit in substantial ways from advances in technology in the home, older adults was a clear target for us.

And the scenario was very much about an older adult perhaps living alone with decreasing cognitive and physical capabilities, but nevertheless, wanting to retain independence, retain quality of life, in their own home as much as possible. And that turned out to be such a rich research area, because once you embraced that group, and their needs as the challenge that you’re going after, it exposed challenges in caregivers and everyday cognition, and forgetting things, and social interaction, and how important that was, and how can you foster social interactions with older adults?

So as soon as we shifted from thinking about ourselves to thinking about others, the quality of the work increased exponentially.

And then, from that, I had taken my ubiquitous computing work from Xerox PARC, and looked at a variety of, what I called, “everyday environments”. So, the home was an everyday environment, where we looked at everyday computing. Offices were another type of everyday environment, and we looked at questions of collaboration and looked at questions of creative expression and creative work.

And so that lasted about a decade in my research group. And part of what drove me to make a pivot in my group was as, especially, mobile technologies, and sensors on the body, and sensors on the environment, because more pervasively available it opened up whole new avenues around healthcare that really just were not accessible to us in that first decade.

And so, again, it was a sitting on the forefront of where the computing field was, so I started with the invention of graphical interfaces and then basic technology in the home environment. Well now we had all this great mobile-sensing and analytics available to us and what was immediately available and interesting to me, at that point, was how people use these technologies to make sense of and improve their health on their own terms.

And that was really important because a lot of folks were building applications that were variations of “do what the doctor tells you to do.” And we know that people don’t do what the doctor tells them to do. And if you put that in a mobile device it really doesn’t change people’s behavior. But if you actually meet, agai