Faculty Member, Computer Science
About
Beat Signer is Assistant 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 and cross-media information systems. His research interests further include innovative forms of information management and interaction, document engineering, ubiquitous and tangible computing, object databases as well as software engineering. He has been co-organiser of the CAiSE 2001 conference, proceedings editor of the CoPADD 2006 and CoPADD 2007 workshops and he is a member of ACM, IEEE, DBTA and the Digital Pen and Paper Society.
General research interests: Interactive Paper and Paper-based User Interfaces, Cross-Media Information Systems, Object Databases, Document Engineering, Web Information Systems, Multimodal Interaction, 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 also 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).
Contact Information
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/signer/
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Department of Computer Science
Pleinlaan 2
1050 Brussels (Belgium)
Office: 10 F 721
+32 2 629 12 39
Fax: +32 2 629 35 25
