Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1304.
Clifton Forlines, Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
In this talk, Clifton will survey his research over the past 20 years into how emerging technologies enable new forms of input and interaction in single and multi-user systems. Long before such technologies are ready for widespread commercial adoption, we as researchers have the opportunity to create “time machines” to explore and define how these technologies will be used. In this talk, he will touch upon the tensions between research and commercialization and outline a few fertile areas for additional investigation.
Bio: Clifton Forlines builds interactive systems that start from the realities of sensing, latency, and physical interaction. His work focuses on how raw signals from touch surfaces, wearables, and embedded sensors can be transformed into reliable, expressive input for real people using real systems.
Across academia and industry, he has designed new sensing architectures, interaction techniques, and evaluation methods for multi-user, low-latency, and safety-critical contexts. His work is grounded in user-centered research, including contextual inquiry, task analysis, and iterative user testing, ensuring that system requirements reflect how people actually work under real constraints and that the results are both useful and usable.
Clifton Forlines is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto where he works to identify the research needs of industry partners and connect them with members of the university research faculty. Previously, Clifton worked as an Associate Research Professor at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute, served as Founder and CTO of Tactual Labs, led the Human-Centered Engineering Group at Draper Laboratory, and worked as a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).