Title:	Cosmetic Computing, Fashioning Fashionables, and Epidermal Electronics: Towards a New Wearable Ecosystem
Speaker:	Eric Paulos University of California, Berkeley

This talk will present and critique a new body of evolving collaborative work at the intersection of art, computer science, and design research. It will present an argument for hybrid materials, methods, and artifacts as strategic tools for insight and innovation within computing culture. The narrative will explore work across three primary themes – New Making Renaissance, Citizen Science, and Cosmetic Computing.

Cosmetic Computing is a vociferous expression of radical individuality and an opportunity for deviance from binary gender norms. It is a catalyst towards an open, playful, and creative expression of individuality through wearable technologies. It’s a liberation call across gender, race, and body types. Leveraging the term “cosmetics”, originally meaning “technique of dress”, we envision how intentionally designed new-wearables, specifically those that integrate with fashionable materials and overlays applied directly atop the skin or body, can (and should) empower individuals towards novel explorations of body and self-expression. Unlike many modern traditional cosmetics that are culturally laden with prescriptive social norms of required usage that are restrictive, sexually binary, and oppressive, we desire a new attitude and creative engagement with wearable technologies that can empower individuals with a more personal, playful, performative, and meaningful “technique of dress” — Cosmetic Computing.

Biography:
Eric Paulos is the founder and director of the Hybrid Ecologies Lab, an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley, Director of the CITRIS Invention Lab, Chief Learning Officer for the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, a Co-Director of the Swarm Lab, and faculty within the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). Previously, Eric held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute and in the Entertainment Technology Center. Prior to CMU, Eric was Senior Research Scientist at Intel Research in Berkeley, California where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in wearables, social telepresence, robotics, urban computing, citizen science, digital fabrication, maker culture, new media, design research, physical computing, persuasive technologies, and intimate media. Eric received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Eric is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit and a frequent collaborator with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories.

Wild gorillas are screwed. Beset by an unholy trinity of commercial bushmeat hunting, habitat loss, and diseases like Ebola, gorilla populations are in free fall. Traditional conservation approaches are failing miserably but a passionate but a technophobic ape conservation community is unwilling or unable to adopt the only hope: the same combination of technological innovation and evidence based decision–making that has so transformed other aspects of modern life. My life-mission is to drag them kicking and screaming into this modern technological world: to act as a sort of start-up that tests new technological solutions to major ape conservation problems. My talk at HotMobile will focus primarily on my efforts to use mobile technologies to transform what are currently deeply unprofitable gorilla tourism programs into profitable business enterprises. I will talk both about the use of wearable tech and drones to habituate gorillas for tourism and broader efforts to create a “wireless park” using technologies like live video streaming to handheld devices to enhance the tourist experience: to expand the gorilla tourism market by making it attractive to geeks like you. I will also touch briefly on my efforts to apply mobile technologies in other aspects of gorilla conservation, including ape vaccination against Ebola virus and population monitoring. I am actively recruiting partners.

Biography:
Peter Walsh is a world expert on both the conservation gorillas and chimpanzees and the reservoir dynamics of Ebola virus. His research is published in leading journals like Science and Nature and covered regularly in the media, including profiles by PBS, the BBC, NPR, the New York Times, and Time. He led the study showing that almost one third of the world gorilla population had been killed by Ebola virus, the report raising the IUCN “Red List” status of western gorillas to Critically Endangered, the first scientific vaccination trial on wild apes, the first conservation-related vaccine trial on captive chimpanzees, and first oral Ebola vaccine trial on chimpanzees. His earlier conservation efforts included design work on the CITES elephant monitoring system, the first scientific surveys of whales in West African waters, the first study of invasive fire ants in Africa, and first meso-scale simulation modelling of climate in African parks. He also originated the wave spread hypothesis for Ebola reservoir dynamics and collaborated on the first molecular analysis of human virus spillover into wild apes, the first study of the effects of tourism on gorilla stress, the first study on invasive fire ants in Africa, and the study identifying gorillas as the source of human malaria. He has also modelled the evolutionary origins of human search in the foraging behaviour of apes and elephants. Peter’s outside-the-box-perspective on ape conservation stems from a unique blend of natural science technical skills, social science training, and on-the-ground experience. He started with a BA in History from Middlebury College, with coursework in Politics and Economics. During PhD studies in Biology at Yale University he turned to the dark side, immersing himself in the black arts (mathematical modelling, statistics, computer programming and molecular biology). He then lived for more than five years in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and Cameroon applying his technical skills to applied wildlife conservation and basic scientific research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the American Museum of Natural History, a Conservation Ecologist at WCS, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Princeton University, and a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.