Communication and computing technology is advancing at an accelerated pace. Although this new technology is supposedly made for the benefit of humans, people are finding it difficult to keep up with it.

The Human Communication Technology (HCT) Research Laboratory at UBC researches a number of key issues that put people "back in the loop" and allow us to communicate experiences both to computer systems and each other more effectively. An awareness of individual variations in human cognitive, physical, and emotional capabilities provides a foundation for acquiring, analyzing, representing, storing, retrieving, transmitting, communicating, and ultimately, synthesizing human experience. Faster processing machines, larger data capacity, new algorithms, multimedia, and multimodal systems will combine with developments in psychology, sociology, and art to enhance the communication abilities between people and machines.

In this talk I will introduce many of the projects that are pursuing advances in Human Communication Technologies, and specifically, a framework I have been developing based on intimacy and embodiment, to understand how people interact with these new technologies and each other. As part of the framework, I consider the aesthetics of relationships as key to describing how people and machines develop intimacy. Supporting the framework are projects that span from engineering to science to art. I will describe some of the projects, including artwork such as: Iamascope and Swimming Across the Pacific, musical work with a two person flute, and more technical work on camera based interfaces.

Sidney has been in the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia since 1998. Sidney received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1994 and 1990 respectively. He received his B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1988. He was a visiting research at ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan from 1996 to 1997. He also worked at Virtual Technologies Inc. in Palo Alto, CA developing the GesturePlus™ system and the CyberServer™ in 1995. He is internationally known for his work in human-computer interaction, neural networks, intelligent agents, new interfaces for musical expression and interactive arts with over 80 scholarly publications and exhibitions. Some of his research projects include Glove-TalkII, Glove-Talk, Iamascope, InvenTcl, French Surfaces, Sound Sculpting and the context-aware mobile assistant project (CMAP). Using the Glove-TalkII system a person could speak with their hands. The device was built to be a virtual artificial vocal tract. The person using the system wore special gloves and used a foot pedal. These devices controlled a model of a vocal tract so that a person could "play" speech much as a musician plays music. His collaborative work on sound sculpting is an extension of this idea to create musical instruments. The Iamascope is an interactive artwork which explores the relationship between people and machines. In Iamascope the participant takes the place of the coloured piece of glass inside the kaleidoscope. The participant’s movements cause a cascade of imagery and music to engulf them. Some of his other artwork includes the Forklift Ballet, Video Cubism, PlesioPhone and Waking Dream. His research on musical interfaces includes Tooka (a two-person flute), MetaMuse (metaphor based interface for granular synthesis), Tongue’n Groove (an tongue based music controller using ultrasound) and 2 Hearts Musical system (uses heartbeats of two people to navigate in a soundscape).