Rob St. Amant Physical address: Room 2268 Engineering Building II Centennial Campus North Carolina State University USPS address: Department of Computer Science NC State University Campus Box 8206 Raleigh, NC 27695-8206 FedEx/UPS address: Department of Computer Science NC State University 890 Oval Drive 3320 Engineering Building II Raleigh, NC 27606 Phone: (919) 515-7938 Fax: (919) 515-7896 email: stamant@csc.ncsu.edu I'm an associate professor in the computer science department at North Carolina State University. My Ph.D. is from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; my CV and papers are online. (For the less technically inclined, I've written several informal essays about interaction design.) Research in my lab can be summarized as targeting models of interaction, drawing on concepts in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Over the past several years I have become interested in the concept of tools, both physical and abstract. Random bits A few news items and other things of note (Spring, 2008): A paper describing AugFrog is now available. I've released the code for simple versions of a partial-order planner and a GraphPlan planner (simple-POP and simple-GP), which I hope will help others in teaching AI and Lisp courses. (The AI Planning Resources page may also be useful.) Current projects   Robot tool use: Some tools seem to have the property that one can tell how they should be used just by looking and experimenting---no instruction or specialized knowledge is needed. Affordances are part of the explanation why, as is general tool-using ability. What exactly do these concepts mean? This project examines how we might build a habile (tool-using) agent, which we call Canis habilis.   Affordances and tool use in user interfaces: The Canis project grew out of work on making interactive objects in user interfaces behave more like objects (tools) in the real world. We developed desktop and multi-touch versions of a drawing application, HabilisDraw and HabilisDraw DT. A script describes what's going on in the HabilisDraw DT video.   Image processing in user interfaces: Most interface agents interact with applications through an API, which provides a different perspective on a system than that of the user. What might we learn from interface agents that can interact with applications through their user interfaces, just as human users do? This project addresses perception, cognition, and interaction issues for these agents, which we call interface softbots. An offshoot of this effort has led to a project that imposes the interaction logic of video games on actual video, as in the proof-of-concept game, AugFrog. (Our interest is more in models of such games than the polish of implementation.)   Cognitive modeling for HCI: We have ongoing collaborations with Frank Ritter at the Applied Cognitive Science Lab at Penn State, and with Wayne Gray at the CogWorks Lab at RPI, to explore the relationship between models of hands, eyes, and cognitive processes. I'll be a bit polemical here: There's not enough attention given to science and engineering in HCI. (I'm guilty of this failing myself in much of my pure HCI work.) While the field has good standards for empirical evaluation of interactive systems, what I think is needed is a better understanding of the principles of interaction. Cognitive modeling and formal modeling are the best candidates for producing such understanding. (Some of my favorite researchers in the field are Wayne Gray, Bonnie John, and Dave Kieras on the cognitive modeling side, Alan Dix and Harold Thimbleby on the formal modeling side.) Software Simple-POP and Simple-GP are planning implementations simple enough to present in one or two classes each (including walking through the code) in an AI or Lisp programming course. G2A is a system that translates high-level procedural GOMSL models into detailed cognitive ACT-R models. SegMan is a perceptual substrate that uses computational vision to "see" the Microsoft Windows graphical direct-manipulation interface, developed as part of the interface softbots project. The latest software release is downloadable; it allows planners, cognitive models (based on ACT-R, Soar, and EPIC), and programmatic controllers to interact directly with off-the-shelf Windows applications.