Kris Hauser
Science of immersive system design
Kris Hauser, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
Immersive systems generate virtual human experiences via a complex interplay between computing hardware, algorithms, communication networks, actuators, sensors, displays, and artistic content interacting with the human mind, body, and senses. Although it may seem appealing at first glance for technology engineers to do what they do best (i.e., optimize each component of a system for speed, bandwidth, latency, and fidelity), delivering a compelling human experience through a device is more challenging than it looks. Comfort, ergonomics, usability, portability, battery life, privacy, security, inter-person variability, and cost play major roles in the adoption and acceptance of immersive technology. Hence, designers of immersive systems will need to face systems-level challenges in choosing system components to strike a balance between the myriad factors of performance. IMMERSE researchers are well poised to tackle these challenges using approaches from hardware/software co-design, formal methods, and experiential engineering.
Biography
Kris Hauser is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Affiliate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2008, bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2003, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. He then joined the faculty at Indiana University from 2009-2014, where he started the Intelligent Motion Lab, and then joined the faculty of Duke University from 2014-2019. He also has consulted for Google's autonomous driving company, Waymo, from 2019-2023. Prof. Hauser is a recipient of a Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Siebel Scholar Fellowship, Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots 2015, the NSF CAREER award, and three Amazon Research Awards.
His research interests include open-world robotics, robot motion planning and control, and semi-autonomous systems, with applications to intelligent vehicles, robotic manipulation, robot-assisted medicine, and legged locomotion.