About Gregory Abowd

Gregory D. Abowd (pronounced AY-bowd) is the Distinguished 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 a member of the School of Interactive Computing and the GVU Center.

Dr. Abowd currently serves as the Interim Director of the Health Systems Institute, a joint Georgia Tech/Emory University research institute investigating the impact of technologies on healthcare delivery. This extends his own work over the past decade on information technologies and autism.

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. One of the major research efforts that Dr. Abowd initated is the Aware Home Research Initiative, which he founded in 2000 and directed until 2008.

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 Dr. Abowd and some of his research from the 1990's. You can read the article here. Much more news about his research can be found .