Dr. Robert J.K. Jacob

The PC World article Tufts Researchers Try to “Read” Users’ Minds said

Tufts University researchers have launched a three-year research project aimed at developing methods that would let computers respond to the brain activity of people using the machines.
 
The project will use light to measure blood flow in the brain, which can be used to identify feelings of work overload, frustration or distraction among computer users, said Robert Jacob, a computer science professor at the Medford, Mass. university. The computer would adjust its user interface based on the measurements of brain activity, he said.
 
“If the computer knew a little more about you, it could behave better,” Jacob said. “If it knew your workload was increasing, maybe it could adjust the layout of the screen. If it knew which air traffic controllers were overloaded, the next incoming plane could be assigned to another controller.”

Robert J.K. Jacob, Ph.D. is Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University, where his research interests are new interaction media and techniques and user interface software. He was also a visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, in the Tangible Media Group, and continues collaboration with that group.
 
Before coming to Tufts, Rob was in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Naval Research Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and he is a member of the editorial boards of Human-Computer Interaction and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
 
He was Papers Co-Chair of the CHI 2001 conference, Co-Chair of UIST 2007, and Vice-President of ACM SIGCHI. He was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2007, an honorary group of people who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and have led the shaping of the field.
 
Rob coedited Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces IV: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces CADUI ‘2004, authored Eye-gaze Computer Interfaces: What You Look At is What You Get, and coauthored Token+Constraint Systems for Tangible Interaction with Digital Information, Improving Performance of Virtual Reality Applications Through Parallel Processing, The TAC Paradigm: Specifying Tangible User Interfaces, A Software Model and Specification Language for Non-WIMP User Interfaces, Designing Tangible Programming Languages for Classroom Use. Read the full list of his publications!