Media Computing Group: Tico Ballagas

Dr. Rafael "Tico" Ballagas alumni Office location:   n/a Office hours:   n/a Telephone:   n/a Email:   n/a

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As of Sept 14, 2007, I am working as a research scientist at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. Please refer to my new website.

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Tico is currently a Doctorate student in the Media Computing Group under the supervision of Prof. Jan Borchers. His research interests lie in the design and implementation of post-desktop user interfaces. Some of his past and current projects include:

• REXplorer
• Phonecam Interactions
• iStuff
• Patch Panel

Tico graduated with a Master's (M.S.) in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and received his Bachelor's (B.S.) degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA. Tico spent some time in industry working for Motorola developing software for the Pagewriter 2000 (rated number 13 by PC World Magazine in the "50 greatest gadgets in the last 50 years") and the Accompli 009.

Professional Activities

• Organizing Committee: Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices PERMID 2007 at Pervasive 2007
• Organizing Committee: Workshop on Usable Ubiquitous Computing in Next-Generation Conference Rooms: Design, Evaluation, and Architecture (website) at Ubicomp 2006
• Organizing Committee: Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices PERMID 2006 at Pervasive 2006
• Organizing Committee: Workshop on Toolkit Support for Interaction in the Physical World TUIT 2004 at Pervasive 2004

Publications

( denotes a major peer-reviewed publication).

2008

Christine Sutter, Jochen Müsseler, Laszlo Bardos, Rafael Ballagas, and Jan Borchers. Transformed movements and perceiving one’s own action. In TeaP 2008, 50. Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen, Mar 2008. .

2007

	Rafael Ballagas and Steffen Walz. REXplorer: Using iterative design techniques for pervasive games. In Carsten Magerkurth and Carsten Röcker, editors, Pervasive Gaming Applications - A Reader for Pervasive Gaming Research, volume 2. Shaker Verlag, 2007. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, Jennifer Sheridan, and Jan Borchers. The Design Space of Ubiquitous Mobile Input. In Joanna Lumsden, editor, Handbook of Research on User Interface Design and Evaluation for Mobile Technologies. IGI Global, Hershey, PA, USA, 2008. .
	Rafael Ballagas. Bringing Iterative Design To Ubiquitous Computing: Interaction Techniques, Toolkits, and Evaluation Methods. PhD thesis, RWTH Aachen University, 2007. .
	Sven Kratz and Rafael Ballagas. Gesture Recognition Using Motion Estimation on Mobile Phones. In PERMID '07. 3rd Intl. Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices at Pervasive 2007., 2007. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Steffen P. Walz, Sven Kratz, Claudia Fuhr, Eugen Yu, Martin Tann, Jan Borchers, and Ludger Hovestadt. REXplorer: A Mobile, Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists. In CHI '07: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1929-1934, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Faraz Memon, Rene Reiners, and Jan Borchers. iStuff Mobile: Rapidly Prototyping New Mobile Phone Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1107-1116, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press. .

2006

	Rafael Ballagas and Jan Borchers. Selexels: a Conceptual Framework for Pointing Devices with Low Expressiveness. Technical Report AIB-2006-16, RWTH Aachen, Dec 2006. .
	Steffen P. Walz, Rafael Ballagas, Jan Borchers, Joel Mendoza, Sven Kratz, Christoph Wartmann, Claudia Fuhr, Martin J. Tann, Dong Youn Shin, Bilal Hameed, Laszlo Bardos, and Ludger Hovestadt. Cell Spell-Casting: Designing a Locative and Gesture Recognition Multiplayer Smartphone Game for Tourists. In Proc. PERGAMES, Third International Workshop on Pervasive Gaming Applications at PERVASIVE 2006, Dublin, Ireland, May 2006. LNCS. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Faraz Memon, Rene Reiners, and Jan Borchers. iStuff Mobile: prototyping interactions for mobile phones in interactive spaces. In Proc. PERMID, Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices at PERVASIVE 2006, Dublin, Ireland, 2006. LNCS. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Steffen Walz, and Jan Borchers. REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software. In CHI 2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo), April 2006. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, Jennifer Sheridan, and Jan Borchers. The Smart Phone: A Ubiquitous Input Device. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 5(1):70-77, Jan-Mar 2006. .

2005

	Trevor Pering, Rafael Ballagas, and Roy Want. Spontaneous marriages of mobile devices and interactive spaces. Commun. ACM, 48(9):53-59, 2005. .
	Rafael Ballagas and Jan Borchers. REXplorer: A mobile, pervasive game for tourists. In ECSCW Workshop on Computer Games & CSCW, September 2005. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, and Jennifer Sheridan. Mobile Phones as Pointing Devices. In Pervasive 2005 Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices (PERMID), Munich, Germany, May 2005. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, Jennifer Sheridan, and Jan Borchers. Sweep and Point & Shoot: Phonecam-Based Interactions for Large Public Displays. In CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1200-1203, New York, NY, USA, April 2005. ACM Press. .

2004

	Rafael Ballagas, Kathryn Yu, and Stacie Hibino. Taking and Sharing Pictures with Phonecams: An Ethnographic Study. Technical report, Stanford University, 2004. Published online under the Creative Commons License, .
	Rafael Ballagas. Patch Panel: Distributed I/O Management for Ubicomp. In UBICOMP Doctoral Colloquium, Nottingham, UK, September 2004. .
	Rafael Ballagas, Andy Szybalski, and Armando Fox. Patch Panel: Enabling Control-Flow Interoperability in Ubicomp Environments. In PerCom 2004 Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, Orlando, Florida, USA, March 2004. .

2003

	Brian Lee, Rafael Ballagas, and Maureen Stone. Designing for Latency: In Search of the Balance Between System Flexibility and Responsiveness. In Ubicomp 2003, Seattle, Washington, USA, October 2003. Workshop position paper for ''At the Crossroads: The Interaction of HCI and Systems Issues in UbiComp'', .
	Rafael Ballagas, Meredith Ringel, Maureen Stone, and Jan Borchers. iStuff: A Physical User Interface Toolkit for Ubiquitous Computing Environments. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 537-544, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 2003. .

2002

	Meredith Ringel, Joshua Tyler, Maureen Stone, Rafael Ballagas, and Jan Borchers. iStuff: A Scalable Architecture for Lightweight, Wireless Devices for Ubicomp User Interfaces. In Ubicomp 2002, September 2002. .
	Jan Borchers, Rafael Ballagas, and Maureen Stone. iStuff: Searching for the Great Unified Input Theory. In UBICOMP 2002: Ubiquitous Computing, September 2002. .

Software

QCplugins - open source plugins for Apple's Quartz Composer
iROS X EventSharing
iStuff

Other Stuff

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