Visiting professor: Tsvi Kuflik (University of Haifa/Israel)

Professor Tsvi Kuflik from the University of Haifa, Israel, is visiting our group from 16 September to 16 November 2015. He will give a talk at Zemanek Seminarraum (TU Wien) on Wednesday, 4 November 2015 at 5 PM titled "The museum as a living lab — A case study for using mobile technology for inferring social aspects in the museum".

Biography of Prof. Kuflik:
Prof. Tsvi Kuflik heads the Information Systems Dept. at The University of Haifa. Over the past ten years, the focus of his work was on ubiquitous user modeling applied to cultural heritage. In the course of his work, a “Living Lab” has been developed at the University of Haifa – a museum visitors’ guide system was developed for the Hecht museum. It is available for visitors on a daily basis and serves also as a test bed for experimenting with novel technologies in the museum. Currently, the system is being used for research on Social Signal Processing where signals transmitted by devices carried by the visitors are used for modeling group behavior, in order to reason about the state of the group visit. Another research direction focusses on the use of intelligent user interfaces in ubiquitous computing within the “living lab”. Where issues like interaction with large, situated displays; interrupt management; navigation support; temporal and lifelong aspects of ubiquitous user modeling are studied. Tsvi got BSc. and MSc. In computer science and PhD. In information systems from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Over the years Tsvi collaborated with local and international researchers, supervised graduate students working with him on this research, organized the PATCH workshops series (Personal Access To Cultural Heritage) and published about 200 scientific papers, out of them 30 papers about this specific research. Tsvi is also a distinguished ACM scientist and a senior IEEE member.