🚀 go-pugleaf

BayCHI,
the San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
(Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction),
announces its September meeting:

Tuesday, September 12, 2000
7:30 - 9:30 pm

Introducing Interaction Design to the Feature Animation Domain
Karon Weber, Pixar
+
QoS is in the Eye of the Beholder:
Meeting Users' Requirements for Internet Quality of Service
Anna Bouch, University College London
+
The Odyssey: Field Trips to Timbuktu and Beyond On the Internet
Jeff Golden, The Odyssey


Xerox PARC Auditorium
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304

(BayCHI meeting attendance is free & open to the public)

(order of presentations TBD)

(socializing/networking from 7 to 7:30 in the lobby;
coffee and tea will be provided)

(BayCHI programs are not audio- or videotaped,
and taping by attendees is not permitted)


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About "Introducing Interaction Design to the Feature Animation Domain":

Pixar is an Academy Award-winning computer animation studio formed in
1986.  The 430 employees contribute to film production in an artistic,
technical, or administrative capacity.  One of the technical
organizations within Pixar is the Studio Tools department, which is responsible for
the design and implementation of Marionette, a proprietary software system
used for modeling, layout, animation, and lighting.  Conceived by a
group of computer graphics visionaries in 1972, Marionette has evolved into a
behemoth engine that precisely controls the camera, the sets, the motion of 
characters, and the look of each frame in a film.

In the spring of 1998, Pixar's interaction design group was formed to collaborate 
with the computer scientists and engineers to refine and enhance Marionette's user 
interface.  This talk describes the work of the interaction design group at Pixar.  
Topics will include an introduction to the feature animation domain, techniques the 
team has employed to understand the communities' work practices, and the 
challenges faced designing within a production-engineering environment.

KARON WEBER is the senior interaction designer at Pixar Animation
Studios.  For almost twenty years, Karon has been working with
technology to either create or interact with moving images.  Her roots
are in documentary film where she worked for a PBS affiliate as a producer/
director.  She then moved from the creative to the technical when she
joined the research staff at Xerox PARC.  During her nine years at PARC,
Karon developed a series of interfaces which support people logging,
editing, and archiving moving images.  She then joined SGI, where she
spent three years leading a design team creating feature animation production 
software for Dreamworks SKG and Alias|Wavefront.  At Pixar, Karon has 
contributed to tools developed for the production of Toy
Story 2 and the upcoming Monsters, Inc.

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About "QoS is in the Eye of the Beholder":

Growing usage and diversity of applications on the Internet makes
Quality of Service (QoS) increasingly critical.  To date, it is not yet known how
objective system quality relates to users' subjective perceptions of
quality.  This talk presents the results of quantitative experiments
that establish a mapping between objective and perceived QoS in the context
of Internet commerce.  It will cover the results of focus groups that were
conducted to determine how contextual factors influence users'
perceptions of QoS.  The results show that, while users' perceptions of World Wide
Web QoS are influenced by a number of contextual factors, it is possible to
correlate objective measures of QoS with subjective judgments made by
users, and therefore influence system design.

ANNA BOUCH received a BA in psychology and an MS in computer science
from University College London.  She will complete her PhD in January 2001.
Her thesis work concerns users' perceptions of network QoS and has resulted
in a set of conceptual models that can be used to predict demand for QoS.
During the PhD work Anna spent 3 months interning at HP Labs in Palo Alto
conducting research into tolerance for Web based QoS.  She is currently
working as an intern at Agilent Labs, Palo Alto, conducting a piece of
ethnographic work to aid the design of novel Bioinformatics tools.

--------
About "The Odyssey: Field Trips to Timbuktu and Beyond On the Internet":

The Odyssey is an Internet-based non-profit producing original content
and interactive events on culture and politics worldwide aimed at educators
and youth.  Its work has garnered The Odyssey numerous awards and notable
mentions from such organizations as the US State Department, Education
World, USA Today, Excite, and the Microsoft Encarta Schoolhouse, among
others.

The Odyssey's first major project, the World Trek (www.worldtrek.org),
launched in January 1999 and completed in August, 2000, has taken
students on an otherwise impossible field trip - a two-year Trek around the
world. More than 2000 classes in over 80 countries traveled the world via The
Odyssey website, their connection to a Team of five educators doing a
real two-year World Trek.  The Trekkers were outfitted with laptops and
digital cameras to document their experiences and the people and places they
visit.

The photos, video, audio, and text they captured were posted on the
website twice a week for students to follow along, free of charge. In addition
to visiting sites of historic and cultural significance, Team Members also
interviewed organizations and people working towards positive change in
the world -- from youth leaders, to international non-profits, to peace and
human rights activists, to prominent figures such as writers and Nobel
Peace Prize Laureates.  Students also interacted with the Team and youth
around the world via live chats, e-mail, polls, and discussion boards.   The
content is available in archived form and is still heavily used by educators
worldwide.

The Odyssey has just launched its next major project -- The United
States Trek (www.ustrek.org). The US Trek will bring US History to life for
hundreds of thousands of students who will follow along with our ten US
Trek Team Members.  The Trek will allow students to travel around the US to
visit historic places, interview historic figures, and meet experts in US
History, all for free via the Internet.  Following the same general format as the
World Trek, the core content will be supplemented by historic
audio/video clips provided by and the Library of Congress, live interviews with
important people in American life, live chats with students nationwide,
and interactive polls and discussion boards.  It is being promoted by such
organizations as PBS.  Like the World Trek, it will be archived for use
indefinitely following the Trek.

JEFF GOLDEN is Founder and Executive Director of The Odyssey: World
Treks for Service and Education (www.ustrek.org).  Jeff first conceived
of The Odyssey in the spring of 1995 and launched the initial website in
the summer of 1996.  He was volunteering full-time with The Odyssey by
1997 and has been directly involved in all aspects of the program's
development to this day.

Jeff is a former teacher of Literature, History, ESL and Bilingual
Studies in Spanish at Leadership and Mission High Schools in San Francisco and
was a Fulbright Scholar to Venezuela ("Sustainable DevelopmentStudies"). In 1999, 
Jeff received the Millenium Volunteer Award from the US State
Department.