Henry Kautz
Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Faculty Affiliate Researcher, Intel Research Seattle

There are many important benefits of having Intel Research Seattle near the University of Washington campus. The lab offers internships to our graduate students to work on projects that lead to Ph.D. thesis results and published papers. It allows faculty to launch collaborative projects quickly, without going through the usual grant writing process, which typically takes six months or more. The lab also serves as a recruiting magnet for both faculty (James Landay, the lab Director, is a great example) and potential graduate students.

My own research has benefited greatly from my collaboration with Intel Research Seattle. The founding lab director, Gaetano Borriello, provided me with both financial (summer salary, grad student internships, and unrestricted research funds) and technical resources, in the form of collaborations with him and other Intel researchers. This support helped me move into a new research area-using sensors and AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms in caring for individuals with cognitive disabilities. Because I had no track record or grants in this area, this was a great help in getting started.

As a result of this early support from Intel, I've now received major funding from NIDRR (National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research) for the Assisted Cognition project that I'm leading at the University of Washington. The Intel lab is collaborating very closely with us on this project. Many of our students are spending their summer as lab interns, and we are jointly carrying out much of the technical work, developing algorithms for inferring high-level descriptions of human behavior using structured probabilistic models and sensor data.

A specific motivation for this research is our mutual interest in healthcare monitoring and prompting applications. More generally, I believe that the combination of "invisible" sensing and computing and the AI reasoning algorithms we are investigating is laying the foundation for the future of computing. Today a person needs to "think like a machine" to use a computer effectively. In the future (25 years?), many computers will not be controlled by explicit typing and mouse clicks, but rather by inferring our wants and needs through observing our physical, social, and verbal behavior. Our research is designed to help us advance toward that future.