Ken Hinckley is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. His research on sensors, mobile devices, pen computing, and pen + touch interaction has been widely covered in the press and tech blogs (MIT Technology Review, The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, Engadget, Slashdot, and many others). Ken holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Virginia where he studied spatial interaction with Randy Pausch, now famous as the late author of “The Last Lecture.”

Ken’s research seeks to augment the capabilities of technologies and user experiences to match human abilities, skills, desires, and expectations. His work has often involved exploration of novel input devices and modalities, unusual sensors and device form-factors, with a dash of panache and a well-lets-just-try-it-and-see-if-it-works sensibility about things. He has a firm belief that you can learn a great deal by observing the natural behaviors of users and an equally firm belief that users can’t tell you how to design an outstanding user experience. Sometimes you just have to put together a few insights, build something new that nobody has ever thought of the need to have before, and unleash it on the world to see what happens.

http://kenhinckley.wordpress.com/about/

Andries van Dam is the Thomas J. Watson Jr., University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science. He has been a member of Brown's faculty since 1965, is a founder of Brown's Computer Science Department, and was its first Chairman from 1979 to 1985. From 2002 to 2006 he was Brown's first Vice President for Research. His research includes work on computer graphics, hypermedia systems, post-WIMP user interfaces (including pen-centric computing), and educational software. Over the last four decades he has worked on systems for creating and reading electronic books with interactive illustrations for use in education and research.

He is the co-author of nearly a dozen books, including "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice", with James D. Foley, Steven K. Feiner, and John F. Hughes (Addison-Wesley 1990). He received a B.S. degree (with Honors) in Engineering Sciences from Swarthmore College in 1960 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and is a member of National Academy of Engineering. His awards include the ACM Steven A. Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics and the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal. He holds honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College and Darmstadt Technical University.

http://research.brown.edu/myresearch/Andy_van_Dam

Ken Forbus is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University, where he carries out research on qualitative reasoning; spatial reasoning, analogical reasoning and learning, and learning from natural language. In his keynote comments he will address the CogSketch tools developed in research on spatial learning in K12 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education fields.