RESEARCH INTERESTS: Assistive Technologies and Universal Access; Human-Computer Interaction; Multimedia Information Visualization; Groupware for Collaborative and Distance Learning; Visual Programming.

List of Publications
Graduate Students Supervised
Citations in the News Media

A BIT ABOUT ME: I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1985; the title of my dissertation was ``PICT: Experiments in the Design of Interactive, Graphical Programming Environments.'' Over the years I developed, together with my graduate students, numerous tools and environments for a variety of user communities and applications domains. Here are some examples of projects in which I was involved, all funded by the National Science Foundation:

• The UnWindows multimodal interface for UNIX users with low vision, a collection of tools written for the X Window System designed to assist visually-impaired users who are not blind interact effectively with a window-based workstation interface. Assistance is provided in two common tasks: locating the mouse pointer on the screen, and selectively magnifying portions of the screen. UnWindows is currently being adapted by Sun Microsystems for inclusion in future releases of their Solaris operating system.
  
  
• The Collaborative Classroom-in-the-Round, whose goal was to explore ways to improve education in software engineering through innovative interactive groupware that supports effective intellectual teamwork via shared displays. This facility, now officially dubbed TR 2015 on campus, is prominently situated in the center of the entrance level of the renovated Troy Building which houses the Institute President's and Provost's offices, and was also featured in Business Week in 1997. An important outcome of this research has been the development of a methodology and tools which allow an individual developer to validate the run-time behavior of CSCW software systems, by integrating a live user into a test session with virtual users whose behavior can be predetermined in a variety of ways.
  
  
• High Performance Problem Solving Environment for Optimization and Control of Chemical and Biological Processes, whose goal was to develop both new numerical algorithms and new directions in multimodal interaction--e.g., using audio (nonspeech) output to augment scientific visualizations--in order to allow scientists to effectively explore extremely complex optimization problems relating, for example, to medical applications.

My most recent projects involved work on algorithms to allow computers to identify tunes based on hummed user input (with Rick Kline, now a faculty member at Pace University in New York City), and use of PDAs for new applications focusing on user collaboration and assistive technology.

I have been involved in various ways with the organization of numerous ACM and IEEE conferences. For example, I served as Program Co-Chair for the 1993 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages (VL'93) in Bergen (Norway), as General Chair of VL'94 in St. Louis, and as General Co-Chair of the 5th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MULTIMEDIA'97) in Seattle. Earlier this month, I served as General Chair of The 2nd IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'02), which was held September 2-6 in Arlington, VA; both an overview of the Final Program for the symposium and the Detailed Program are available online.

During the period 1991-2001, I served three terms as Chair of ACM's Special Interest Group for Computers and the Physically Handicapped (SIGCAPH), in which capacity I was instrumental in initiating the ACM conference series on assistive technologies (ASSETS). ASSETS'04, the 6th conference in this series, was held October 18-20, 2004, in Atlanta. And SIGCAPH has now been renamed SIGACCESS!

From 9/1/1998 through 8/31/2001, I was on detail from Rensselaer to the National Science Foundation, where I served as Deputy Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division, and as Program Director for Knowledge and Cognitive Systems (artificial intelligence), Human-Computer Interaction, and Universal Access. As of September 9, 2002, I am once again back at NSF. Here's my current contact information:

Ephraim P. Glinert, Program Director
Human-Computer Interaction and Universal Access
CISE / IIS Division, Room 1125
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22230

Phone: (703) 292 8930
Fax: (703) 292 9073
E-mail: eglinert @ nsf . gov


Detailed List of Professional Activities

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