My new project: Tact, a simple chat app.

I saw talks by Freddy Anzures and Panagiotis Papadimitratos

September 08, 2007

One of the great things about going to an interdisciplinary university is that you get to go to talks that are not strictly part of your curriculum, yet they’re highly enjoyable and educational.

Yesterday I saw a talk by Freddy Anzures at Carnegie Mellon University School of Design by Freddy Anzures, a CMU alumnus who’s been working at Converse and frog design and is now at Apple’s Human Interface Group. His most recent public work was on the iPhone, he said this project took three years of his life. Understandably he couldn’t talk about his current and future work, but he shared great insights of his personal journey at CMU design school where he did fun industrial design projects and then at Converse as an intern and all those other things. I’m not a visual designer by trade myself, but I’ve always enjoyed working with them and I liked this talk a lot.

Design School

The second talk was of very different kind. Dr Panos Papadimitratos studies (among other things) vehicular communications security at EPFL and this talk was about his recent work about studying security and privacy in these ad-hoc networks. I’m interested a lot in HCI, security and traffic/safety/driving and it’s cool to see talks where these come together, although this was a more academic talk and so there was less HCI element. But there was some protocol analysis and PKI, certification and pseudonyms and key lengths and computation efficiency and such other security things that I’ve been working with a bit before, so I felt quite at home listening to this.