Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Faculty Member, Computer Science

About

Beat Signer is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Belgium, where he is co-director of the Web and Information System Engineering (WISE) laboratory. He is investigating interactive paper solutions, multimodal and multi-touch interaction as well as cross-media information systems. His research interests further include innovative forms of information management and interaction, document engineering, ubiquitous and tangible computing, object databases and software engineering. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, DBTA and the Digital Pen and Paper Society.

General research interests: Interactive Paper, Pen and Paper User Interfaces (PPUIs), Multimodal and Multi-Touch Interaction, Cross-Media Information Systems, Object Databases, Document Engineering, Web Information Systems, Ubiquitous and Tangible Computing, Software Engineering.

As part of the European Paper++ and PaperWorks projects, Beat developed the interactive paper (iPaper) framework for integrating paper and digital services and information. Different solutions for innovative forms of interactive paper document publishing have been realised and the iPaper framework has been applied in a variety of applications including PaperPoint, EdFest, Generosa Enterprise, the Lost Cosmonaut, Print-n-Link, PaperProof and other solutions. We recently released iGesture a general framework for gesture recognition under an open source license. Based on the experience that we gained from realising the interactive paper applications, Beat is currently investigating general design patterns and paper widgets for the new type of paper-digital user interfaces.

More recently, Beat started to extend the RSL metamodel, to deal not only with navigational cross-media linking, but also enable the structural representation of new forms of cross-media documents and information spaces. Furthermore, the open source iGesture framework is currently extended to support new types of gestures (e.g. 3D gestures).

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