MIT CSAIL seminar: The PlaceLab: What it does, what's been done with it, and how you can use it for your own research

Speaker: Stephen Intille , MIT House_n
Date: Friday, October 14 2005

The PlaceLab is a sensor-enabled live-in laboratory for the study of people and technologies in the home setting. The facility is a 1000 sq. foot condominium in a residential neighborhood in Cambridge. Volunteer research participants live in the PlaceLab for days or weeks at a time, treating it as a temporary home. Meanwhile, sensing devices integrated into the fabric of the architecture record a detailed description of their activities. The facility generates sensor and observational datasets that can be used for research in ubiquitous computing and other fields where domestic contexts impact behavior. I will describe the design and operation of the PlaceLab, how the MIT House_n group has been using it for sensor development and exploratory evaluation of preventive healthcare technologies, and (most importantly) how you might be able to exploit the facility for your own research.

Bio: Stephen Intille, Ph.D., is Technology Director of the House_n Consortium in the MIT Department of Architecture. His research is focused on the development of context-recognition algorithms and interface design strategies for ubiquitous computing environments and devices. In current work he is developing systems for preventive health care that support healthy aging and well-being in the home by motivating longitudinal behavior change. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1999 working on computational vision at the MIT Media Laboratory, an S.M. from MIT in 1994, and a B.S.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He has published research on computational stereo depth recovery, real-time and multi-agent tracking, activity recognition, perceptually-based interactive environments, and technology for preventive healthcare. Dr. Intille has been principal investigator on two NSF ITR grants focused on automatic activity recognition from sensor data in the home, as well as the MIT principal investigator on sensor-enabled health technology grants from Intel, the National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He received an IBM Faculty award in 2003.

Home page: http://www.mit.edu/~intille