User talk:RobTow

Title:    "Clockwork and Steam Engines; Apollo and Rain Forests; Ubiquity and Ambience".

Speaker:       Rob Tow

Abstract. In early modern Europe two metaphors drawn from technology-clockwork determinism and feedback control in steam engines-competed intellectually and influenced technology, politics and society, leading to differing expressions in Continental Europe and Britain. Likewise, in peri-Y2K modernity, the two metaphors of Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Computing both provide frameworks for developing technology, agency, and politics - one an Apollonian vision of discourse mediated through distributed displays and UI; the other an emergent ecology of agency distributed among people and machines. I will argue for the power of the latter metaphor, and describe the potential of exteriorizing human agency into active objects that have their own perception/representation/action loop. I will also describe Sun Labs' new sensor network platform for exploring and developing such systems - "Sun SPOTS"./

Bio: Rob Tow is a computer researcher and developer with 28 years of wide ranging experience. A Xerox PARC veteran, he was the principle inventor of the Xerox DataGlyph technology, and holds several patents for it including the fundamental patent as sole inventor, and also has an additional Xerox patent for an amorphous silicon scanner design. At Paul Allen's research lab Interval Research he pioneered affective computing and holds two patents for emotional robotics with the major prior art cited as Charles Darwin's "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals". At interval he also co-developed the "Placeholder" virtual reality project, and explored perceptually based video search techniques. Rob also worked at AT&T Labs in wearable computing, and has had two stints at Sun Microsystems Labs - in the second of which he was one of the principle developers of the Sun SPOT wireless sensor network platform, for which he has six pending patents, ranging from swarm intelligence theft detection through emergent network resource allocation to MEMS gesture UI. His most recent position was at NASA Ames Research Center.