Matthias Kranz defended his PhD

Today Matthias Kranz defended his PhD thesis „Engineering Perceptive User Interfaces“ successfully at the University of Munich! Congratulations… and remember "Training to become a Jedi is not an easy challenge. And even if you succeed, it's a hard life." (Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace)

After Enrico Rukzio Matthias is the second of my PhD students who worked with me in Munich to finish. He is now with the German Aerospace center (DLR).

Matthias worked on the DFG project “Embedded Interaction” and has created and published an impressive set of prototypes and studies in pervasive computing over the last 4 years. See his homepage for details. If you only have time to read 2 pages – here is my suggestion: Context-aware kitchen utilities [1].

The personalized doctoral hat is a German tradition –and Matthias got a fully functional prototype of a perceptive doctoral hat (following the modification and restriction approach suggested in his thesis, but created without end-user involvement to keep the surprise ;-)

Insider hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfilm - just don’t!

[1] Kranz, M., Schmidt, A., Maldonado, A., Rusu, R. B., Beetz, M., Hörnler, B., and Rigoll, G. 2007. Context-aware kitchen utilities. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 - 17, 2007). TEI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 213-214. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1227013