Welcome!
I'm an Associate Professor at the Georgia Tech College of Computing, and the Associate Director of the GVU Center. I also am affiliated with the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.
My research interests focus on looking at how aspects of systems infrastructure can “show through” and manifest themselves as part of the user experience and, in turn, the implications of that for the design of systems. My current projects are exploring human-centered approaches to networking, usable security, and ubiquitous computing middleware. Broadly, I work at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and systems and networking technologies, but consider myself primarily an HCI person.
I direct the Pixi Lab and am the organizer of Georgia Tech's Tiger Team student design competition in usable security research.
I joined Georgia Tech fairly recently (Fall 2004), and am still somewhat in the process of getting settled. I do have a selected list of some of my publications up, so you can see the sorts of things I work on. My old PARC page may still be up as well.
Past Lives
Before joining Georgia Tech I was a Principal Scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Computer Science Lab, and managed the Ubiquitous Computing group there. I spent about nine years at PARC in total.
Going further back, I've worked at Sun Microsystems Labs, SunSoft, and the now-defunct Olivetti Research Center (all on internships), and a bunch of places (including NeXT Computer, Lockheed, BellSouth, SecureWare, and others) as a consultant.
I got doctorized at Georgia Tech in the venerable discipline of computer science, where my Ph.D. work was on Intermezzo, a toolkit for building context-aware collaborative applications (I worked on a ton of other stuff during that period too; check out my research page for more details). I did Ph.D. and undergrad specializations in experimental psychology, and also did a fair amount of microcontroller-based design work in the EE department, although the latter seems to have been largely repressed. I also occasionally taught classes on VAX assembler, played on the university lacrosse team, learned to cook, never learned to play the banjo, and was a DJ at WREK, the greatest radio station on Planet Earth.
Going all the way back, I was born in Virginia, and grew up in Tennessee. I'm a leo and my favorite color is blue.
Book Stuff
I'm the author of Core Jini and co-author of Jini Example by Example from the Sun Microsystems Press Java Series. If you’ve got either of the books, or are just Jini-curious, please visit Jini Planet, which has updates and bug fixes for the book, a more detailed overview, tips on troubleshooting Jini apps, pointers to downloadable code, and a few articles.
All Work and No Play...
I like to cook a lot. Especially if it involves potential loss of life and limb, or obscene amounts of oil.
I'm a typography and typesetting geek, and while I was in San Francisco did a fair bit of letterpress (handset cold metal type) printing, using the resources at the excellent San Francisco Center for the Book, including their Vandercook presses and great metal type library. Since moving to Atlanta I'm in the market for my own press (probably a tabletop platten press, since a Vandercook would likely require a new foundation for my house). Let me know if you have any leads...
Raccoons are my favorite animal. Giant squids are are a close second though.
I like to read a lot. Some favorites include The Sot-Weed Factor (John Barth), A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy O'Toole), Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov), Towing Jehovah (James Morrow), Possession (A.S. Byatt), Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), and Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut).
The world is blessed that I have so little musical talent that I generally never touch a musical instrument. Nevertheless, I listen to a lot of stuff. My current top-shelf musical selections are the Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson, the Crumb soundtrack, Information (by Toenut, a great Atlanta band), Puta’s Fever (Mano Negra, a great French band with a Spanish name), Rollin’ (Rebirth Brass Band), Bachelor No. 2 (Aimee Mann), Bone Machine (Tom Waits), Stratosphere Boogie (Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant: great early speed-death-country), Whip-Smart (Liz Phair), and just about any damned thing ever recorded by James Brown, the Pixies, Patsy Cline, or Etta James.
Contact Info:
W. Keith Edwards
keith at cc dot gatech dot edu
GVU Center - Technology Square Research Building
85 Fifth Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30332-0760 (please use ZIP 30308 for FedEx and other direct deliveries)
tel: 404.385.6783
fax: 404.894.3146