College of Computing, Georgia Tech

Gregory D. Abowd

Index

About Gregory Abowd
Here is my weekly schedule for Spring 2005. I am on professional leave starting August 15, 2004, and will be away from Atlanta at least one week per month, working at the Intel Research Seattle lab.  During this period, I will be advising no undergrads or masters students.

Check out the new 3rd edition of my textbook, Human-Computer Interaction.

Gregory D. Abowd (pronounced AY-bowd) is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech . His research interests lie in the intersection between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. Specifically, Dr. Abowd is interested in ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) and the research issues involved in building and evaluating ubicomp applications that impact our everyday lives. In the College of Computing, he is involved in research with faculty from the GVU Center and the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute.

Dr. Abowd directs the Ubiquitous Computing Research Group in the College of Computing and GVU Center. This effort started with the Future Computing Environments research group in 1995, and has since matured into a collection of research groups, including Dr. Abowd's own group.. The FCE Group now consists of a federation of many faculty in the College of Computing. One of the major research efforts that Dr. Abowd initated is the Aware Home Research Initiative, now directed by Beth Mynatt, together with many faculty in the College of Computing, School of Psychology, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Dr. Abowd received the degree of B.S. in Mathematics and Physics in 1986 from the University of Notre Dame. He then attended the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the Programming Research Group in the Computing Laboratory. From 1989-1992 he was a Research Associate/Postdoc with the Human-Computer Interaction Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in England. From 1992-1994, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

In the Fall of 1999, the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine did a profile on me and some of my research. You can read the article here.

Research Interests

Check out the Ubiquitous Computing< Research Group's Web site. This details information about the students I directly supervise within the College of Computing. Here is an overview of my current research, updated much less frequently. This will give you an idea of what I have been doing at Georgia Tech in the area of Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction applied to ubiquitous computing and software architectures. This is also available in PDF format. These links include references to much of my recent publications. A complete bibliography can be found in my curriculum vitae, available only in PDF format. This c.v. is in a Georgia Tech defined format, so there might be details there you won't be interested in.

My main research interests lie in the intersection between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. Specifically, I have been working on the following themes:

Ubiquitous Computing for Future computing environments
I lead a research group, the Future Computing Environments Group. The FCE Group mission is to invent and better understand what constitutes an effective, everyday partnership between humans and technology. In April 1995, I co-founded the FCE Group with Chris Atkeson. Today, the FCE Group is recognized nationally and internationally as a premier research group in ubiquitous computing. Our reputation has directly resulted in a growth in associated faculty and research breadth and depth. There are now seven full-time faculty (Abowd, Atkeson, Aaron Bobick, Irfan Essa, Blair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Mynatt & Thad Starner) in the FCE Group, with over 20 PhD students and numerous masters and undergraduates. In addition to pushing a strong experimental research agenda in various subdisciplines of Computer Science, the FCE Group fosters a culture of excellence in the development of living laboratories for research.investigating and building futuristic computing applications that apply ubiquitous computing technology to everyday life situations, such as education, tourism and the home.
Software architecture
As a result of two years postdoctoral experience at Carnegie Mellon, I have been working on models to specify and evaluate software architectures. This work has produced a formal framework for defining architectural styles and a process for performing scenario-based architectural evaluations. The evaluation work is part of a continuing research effort with colleagues at the Software Engineering Institute. I am also working with colleagues here at Georgia Tech on a DARPA-sponsored project, MORALE with a large software architecture emphasis.
Formal methods in HCI
Development of formal specification languages to support description and analysis of interactive systems. This was the principal focus of my doctoral thesis and postdoctoral research at the University of York. It is no longer a mainstream focus in my research, but I have recently done some work on applications of model checking to dialogue specification and verification.

Publications

My full publication list is available from my on-line curriculum vitae. Most of my Georgia Tech publications are available in other separate on-line listings:

Projects

Much of our work is situated in existing everyday settings, such as the classroom (see eClass), the office (see the TeamSpace project and the Augmented Office by others in the FCE Group) and the home (see Aware Home). There are some general themes to the research, listed below.

Advisees

 More information on most of these folks can be found on their own Web pages and at the FCE people page

Teaching

 I have done a lot of research on ways to use ubiquitous computing technology and the WWW to support education. You can trace the path of this research by taking a look at the various classes I have been teaching. A lot of the projects students do in my class are ideas that have come from my work in Future Computing Environments. In particular, you might be interested in how our work on eClass (formerly Classroom 2000) has been playing out in my classes. The research system stopped being used in Fall 2001. we are waiting on the next version of such a capture system.

Seminars

HCI Seminar
Starting in Spring 2002, we initiated a reading seminar for researchers in HCI. What took us so long!
Future Computing Environments Seminar
A discussion group on ubiquitous computing and new trends in computing. In Spring 2002, this single seminar series was replaced by separate HCI and Computational Perception and Robotics Seminars.
Reading group on software architecture
Software Engineering Seminar: Software Architecture, Fall 1995

Lecture Courses

CS 6750/4750 Human-Computer Interaction
A graduate/undergraduate introductory course on HCI. I use my own book, Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.
, published by Prentice-Hall, International. Here are pointers to the various times I have taught this course.

CS 4470/6456 Principles of User Interface Software
A graduate/undergraduate advanced course on the tools and architectures for creating traditional 2-dimensional graphical user interfaces as well as non-traditional "off-the-desktop" interactive systems.

CS 7470 Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
A new course created by Gregory Abowd and Thad Starner on research topics covering ubiquitous, wearable and mobile computing topics. It has been taught every year since the initial offering, and is currently listed as CS 7470.

CS 7001 Introduction to Graduate Studies
An introductory course for new Ph.D. students in the College of Computing.

CS 3302 Introduction to Software Engineering
An undergraduate project-based course teaching fundamentals of software engineering.Here are pointers to the various times I have taught this course.

CS 4310/11/12 Software Engineering Lab (Real World Lab) .
This course is team taught by the Software Engineering Faculty and is a multi-term project class.
CS 2390 Modeling and Design
Undergraduate object-oriented analysis, design and programming course. I taught this class once, the Fall 1995 quarter.
CS 8113 Specification and analysis of interactive systems
A special topics course on formal methods as applied to interactive systems. Taught only once, in Spring 1995.

Pointers to other useful information in the College of Computing
Gregory Abowd
329 Technology Square Research Building (TSRB)
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280
Phone: +1 (404)894-7512
Fax: +1 (404)894-2970
abowd AT cc.gatech.edu
Last modified: Tue Feb 12 14:33:50 EST 2002