Technology that cares and teaches
Pioneering Ron Baecker makes new media work for people
Ron Baecker is happy to leave technology design to someone else.
“My role is to take the technology that’s available and think up wild-eyed,crazy ideas of what we can do with it.”
He makes that sound funny,but he’s not kidding.
Take a look outside his office in UofT’s information technology headquarters,the Bahen Centre. All over the walls are detailed posters describing his current projects.He may call them “crazy ideas,”but they are,in fact,actually helping people.
One project—“Technology to Support Cognition and Combat Memory Impairments”—suggests how new media devices can be used by people who have cognitive impairments,such as amnesia or the early effects of Alzheimer’s disease,to manage their lives more effectively.
Another is ePresence,open-source software based on Baecker’s research that has recently resulted in a spin-off company formed to deliver ePresencesolutions. Deployed on six continents,ePresenceis a webcasting technology that is used by a variety of organizations to share live lectures,conferences and meetings.By way of example,Baecker calls up on screen two human-computer interaction consultants in Minneapolis giving a lecture to 20 students spread across Canada from Halifax to Vancouver. Not only do you see the lecture,but the screen also features a PowerPoint presentation and students can e-mail questions as the lecture progresses.“
There is no question that what we have done—me and a million others—has been for the benefit of society.That’s what drives me.”
Named by ACM SIGGRAPH (an international computer graphics society) as one of the 60 pioneers of computer graphics,Baecker got his start as a student at M.I.T.in the mid 1960s when he stumbled into a job at a lab where he built his first computer graphics program.“It was the classic ‘right place at the right time’story.They had me work with this amazing machine called a TX-2 and I’ve just carried on from that.”
What drew him into the field,however,was the relationship between humans and computers.His working philosophy today is informed by one of the great computer science innovators,J.C.R.Licklider.“In 1960 he wrote an article called Man-Computer Symbiosis.He envisioned a time when people and computers would work together to create things that neither could do alone.That really influenced me.”
With that in mind,Baecker formed U of T’s Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) in 1996.The virtual organization draws together faculty from a dizzying array of disciplines to design uses of digital media technology for a similarly broad palette of applications,and to think deeply about how the increasing use of digital media is changing us and the world. He also collaborates with scientists and graduate students at the Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit at Baycrest,the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
In fact,Baecker is a collaborator extraordinaire,placing a huge value on creating solutions by partnering with people like Baycrest neuropsychologist Brian Richards,social work professor Elsa Marziali,and the team of young new media experts he works with on ePresence.
As for Baecker’s next steps,he thinks back to his early days.“That TX-2 was three times the size of my office. Today,you can get something a hundred times better that is the size of your cell-phone.So,the technology keeps getting better.With that,we can do even more. That’s why I plan to keep at this for a long time.”