UbiComp / ISWC 2023
Keynote Speakers

Opening Keynote – 10th October | Cozumel | 9 am

From Victorian trains to chatbots: exploring AI interface design

Is language all you need to interact with AI, or is there room for other interfaces? Our talk will explore a series of speculative ideas on how we might help people work with AI effectively, safely, and enjoyably. Combining ideas from Victorian railways with a dive into the mechanics of deep neural networks, we propose a new kind of AI instrumentation. We argue that if toasters and coffeemakers have displays that tell you their internal state, we should expect nothing less for a machine learning model with a trillion parameters.

Fernanda Viégas

Fernanda Viégas co-leads Google’s PAIR (People+AI Research) initiative and the Big Picture team, part of Google Brain, and she is a Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. Renowned for her groundbreaking work in data visualization, Prof. Viégas’s contributions have notably impacted the field of social and collaborative visualization. The software systems developed by her team are utilized daily by millions of individuals.

Within the academic realm, she co-leads the renowned Insight and Interaction Lab alongside Professor Martin Wattenberg. Her expertise also extends to her role as a Sally Starling Seaver Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. With a primary focus on machine learning, she is dedicated to enhancing the interaction between humans and AI while simultaneously working toward the democratization of AI technology. She is deeply invested in integrating societal expectations and values into the design and evaluation of AI systems.

Her personal experiences as a Latina with a non-technical background have shaped her commitment to promoting diversity in technological fields. Prof. Viégas actively collaborates with leaders and students, engaging in constructive dialogues and addressing the underrepresentation of women and minorities in computer science.

For further information please visit her personal website.

Martin Wattenberg

Martin Wattenberg is a Professor at Harvard University and a part-time member of the PAIR (People + AI Research) initiative at Google, he dedicated his research to democratizing AI technology and ensuring its alignment with human values.

Together with his long-time collaborator, Fernanda Viégas, he has created user-friendly visualizations for prominent Google products such as Search, YouTube, and Google Analytics.

Prior to his tenure at Google, he and Prof. Viégas established Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio that focused on media and consumer-oriented projects. He also held leadership positions at IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where he spearheaded the development of the groundbreaking Many Eyes public visualization platform. Additionally, he served as the Director of Research and Development at SmartMoney.com, a division of Dow Jones, where he played a pivotal role in pioneering interactive journalism.

Closing Keynote (October 12) – Yeshimabeit “Yeshi” Milner

Yeshimabeit “Yeshi” Milner

Yeshimabeit “Yeshi” Milner is the Founder & CEO of Data for Black Lives. She has worked since she was 17 as a movement builder, technologist and data scientist. She started Data for Black Lives because for too long she straddled the worlds of data and organizing and was determined to break down the silos to harness the power of data to make change in the lives of Black people. In five years Data for Black Lives has changed the conversation around big data & technology across the US and globally.Yeshi has received much recognition for her work. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow and in 2019 became a Forbes Under 30 social entrepreneur. In 2020 she received a New York Times Good Tech Award for Data for Black Lives’s COVID- 19 database, and in 2021 was awarded the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, which recognizes leaders under 40 who have made significant contributions to politics and public service.

UbiComp / ISWC

Past Conferences

The ACM international joint conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) is the result of a merger of the two most renowned conferences in the field: Pervasive and UbiComp. While it retains the name of the latter in recognition of the visionary work of Mark Weiser, its long name reflects the dual history of the new event.

The ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC) discusses novel results in all aspects of wearable computing, and has been colocated with UbiComp and Pervasive since 2013.

A complete list of UbiComp, Pervasive, and ISWC past conferences is provided below.