Dr. Mike Bennett

Mike Bennett is a postdoctoral researcher and interaction designer in the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, at the School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland. Previously he was a Research Associate at MIT Media Lab Europe (MLE), in the Palpable Machines Group, where he invented and built haptic and body based interaction techniques and devices. During his time in MLE he was also a member of the Adaptive Speech Interfaces Group, where he researched Information Visualisation techniques for browsing large digital media collections.

His research interests are in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with a specific focus on methods, tools and techniques that enable users to take control and shape their own user experiences. Research in this area is important because the emerging research and commercial fields of Mass Customisation and Product Personalisation indicate we can expect a future where the physical world become real-time adaptable. This raises new challenges and opportunities for researchers and businesses as they seek to model and cater for individual user differences, wants and needs.

As an entrepreneur he co-founded and lead a successful IT company for five years (6+ employees), since then he has provided independent IT / HCI consulting and helped Irish new media startups ship multiple international software products.

For his PhD he developed methods for measuring visual design effectiveness and enabling visual design adaptions based on individual physiological differences. Particularly focused on individual psychophysical differences in low-level vision. With the techniques he developed, predictions can be made about how easy or hard a visual design or information visualisation is to see. Then the predictions can be used to automatically improve the display of complex visualisations and designs to suit individual differences in eye function. This research was multi-disciplinary, involving knowledge and techniques from visual design, optometry, optics, vision science, probabilistic modeling and modeling individual differences in physiological function.

His research and art work has been shown at events such as CHI (04, 06), San Francisco Museum of Modem Art (MOMA) (08/09), Futuresonic (09), Ars Electronica (04), Transmediale (04), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Whitney Museum of American Art's ArtPort (03), Observatori (03), Microwave Festival (04), and has been written about in The New York Times, Neural, Rhizome.org, SlashDot.org, and others.