CS Seminars: Dr. Kori Inkpen

Who:  Dr. Kori Inkpen (former PhD student from UBC! now at MSR)
Date: Thursday, April 14
Time: 3:30 PM
Room: FSC 1001

Title:     Connecting Kids with Video

Abstract: Children's play is rich and creative and they love to play with others.  Although there has been a lot of focus in the research community on connecting children with distant adults (e.g., grandparents, divorced parents), there has been much less work on connecting children with other children. It is unclear how children's play will differ when they use video-mediated communication technology, and whether their imaginative play can transcend these technologies.  This talk will present results from three recent studies where we examined how children interact and communicate with other children using video. The first project, Video Playdate examined children's free play over video conferencing and explored various prototypes to better support children's rich interactions. The second two projects examined children's use of an asynchronous video mediated communication tool. The first project, VideoPal, provided children from Washington, USA and Corfu, Greece with a video pen pal tool for two months to enable them to develop a distance friendship. The second project, KidVid, deployed the same tool to a close-knit group of friends and observed how they used video to augment their existing friendships. The results of this research demonstrate that there is huge potential for the use of video to augment children's interactions, to both build and sustain personal relationships, regardless of whether they are near or far.

Bio:  Dr. Kori Inkpen is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and manager of the VIBE Connect group. Her main area of research is Computer Supported Cooperative Work. The goal of her research is to explore alternative computing environments to support natural, seamless collaborative interactions, for both work and play. This includes face-to-face as well as distributed computing environments. More recently she has been focusing on videoconferencing and the potential of video to connect people. She has studied children's collaborative use of technology off and on for the past seventeen years. Prior to joining Microsoft she was a professor in Canada for 10 years at Simon Fraser University and Dalhousie University.