Andreas Butz - Research

To see at a glance what's in my research papers, look at this keyword collection which a student project in 2006 automatically generated from our publication database. My research interest is in User Interfaces and Human-Computer Interaction. I strongly believe that (within Computer Science) this is one of the most important areas of research for the coming decades, since it influences the way in which we use and perceive computers. My work in this field was awarded with the Alcatel Lucent Research Award in 2007.

Computers roughly adhere to Moore's law, doubling their computing and storage capacities every 18 months, but humans don't do that. So we'll have to find ways to interact with more and more complex computer systems and environments, as well as new forms of computers, and we'd better find them fast.

To this end, I'm currently heading the FLUIDUM research group on User Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing in the CS Department at LMU Munich, Germany. The group started its work in the CS Department at Saarland University in 2003 and moved with me to Munich in 2004. It follows an exploratory approach by designing interaction concepts for the future, building prototypes with today's available technology, and evaluating their use in order to find general principles which can be reapplied to new concepts. The group is funded by DFG in their Emmy Noether Programme

In 2000 I founded, together with several colleagues and students, Eyeled GmbH, a Spin-off Company of Saarland University and DFKI, and served as a CEO for it for the first two years. Eyeled is developing software solutions for mobile devices with a strong focus on usability and UI design. It currently employs 17 people. Eyeled's customers include museums and world heritage sites, congresses and trade shows, but also different industry branches. See their home page for more detailed references.

Both Eyeled and our group at LMU are involved in the European Project Discreet which investigates privacy issues for mobile computing and surveillance scenarios. The project started in 2006 and involves 10 partners from various European countries. Again, more detail can be found on the Discreet home page.

Until 2000, I was a full time researcher (and technically the project leader) in the project REAL, which is part of the Collaborative Research Center 378 in the CS Department at Saarland University. REAL stands for REsource Adaptive Localization and the project is concerned with communication about space. This includes giving way instructions in textual and graphical form on a variety of devices. It produced the IRREAL prototype, upon which Eyeled was founded.

From 9/97 until 10/98, I was a visiting scholar on a grant from DAAD at Columbia University, New York. In Steven Feiner's lab, I worked on user interfaces for augmented reality. The project I led during these 14 months was called EMMIE and its goal was to develop a User Interface Metaphor for the lab's augmented reality demos.

Before that, I was a PhD student at DFKI Saarbrücken. My Thesis was on the automatic generation of 3D animation clips for communicative purposes. To this end, I learned a lot about filmmaking and lighting, which nicely aligned with my interest in photography, and built a prototype system called CATHI which generated 3D animation clips in real time with complete camera and object motions, as well as a number of optical tricks, such as perspective, expressive lighting, and depth of field.