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Péter Boda
Senior Manager, New User Interface
Palo Alto, CA
Contact

Background

I am a Senior Manager for the New User Interface Focus Area, in the Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, California, laboratory.

I received my M.Sc.E.E. degree in Telecommunications and Telematics from the Technical University of Budapest (TUB) in 1991. After pursuing post-graduate studies at TUB, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (now Radboud University Nijmegen) and Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), I received my Licentiate of Technology degree from HUT on "Psychoacoustical Considerations in Speech Analysis and Recognition" in 1995. The same year I joined Nokia Research Center as a senior researcher in Tampere, Finland. Initially, I worked as an assistant group manager on spoken dialogue systems, language technology, usability, and application development. Among other speech-enables systems we developed the multilingual Nokia Corporate Dialler, the bi-lingual Program Guide Information System (PGIS) and the speech front-end for Nokia One, an sms-based email application back in the early 2000s.

Later I worked as a Technology Expert focusing on multimodality and advanced man-machine interfaces in preparation of EU and Finnish national projects. I spent my sabbatical year (2003-2004) as a Visiting Scientist with the Spoken Language Systems Group, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA.

Since August 2007 I am located in the new laboratory of Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. In the past years I worked on the SensorPlanet global initiative, with top universities around the world, on mobile device-centric wireless network applications, as well as led the Social Proximity Networks team focusing on mobile social networking applications that can enrich communication and mobile interaction by using contextual information from various sources. From February 2009, after being a researcher for 14 years or so, I became part of the strategy team and now as the manager of the New User Interface Focus Area, the largest activity within NRC with more than 16 teams globally, driving the creation of a holistic research portfolio on user interfaces and user exerience. Our goal is to bring joyful and intuitive mobile interaction solutions to the hands of the consumers.

Professional Activities

I have been a member of organizing, program and scientific committees of several workshops and conferences, most recently:

4^th Workshop On Speech In Mobile And Pervasive Environments (SIMPE’09) at MobileHCI'2009 (http://research.ihost.com/SiMPE/)

International Workshop on Improved Mobile User Experience (IMUx’2007), at Pervasive 2007 (http://www.hiit.fi/events/imux2007/)

Workshop on World-Sensor-Web (WSW’2006), “Mobile Device Centric Sensory Networks and Applications”, at ACM SenSys’2006 (http://www.sensorplanet.org/wsw2006/)

Research Interests

My research interests include advanced user interface solutions where contextual and sensor information provide a better understanding of the user’s intention. In the field of multimodality, I am especially interested in statistical integration mechanisms with a wider scope than mere fusion of the actual user input modalities (see some of my related publications).

Earlier I have been the program manager of SensorPlanet, a Nokia initiative on mobile device-centric large-scale wireless sensor networks. I worked closely with several top universities focusing on establishing a global open research framework where sensor data is accumulated from around the world into a central repository and re-used to provide new types of information for novel application scenarios. The main outcome of SensorPlanet, as of now, are the unique works stimulated at the universities on device-centric sensing, participatory sensing, environment monitoring, social networking, etc.

See sensorplanet.org and storymashup.org.

I represented Nokia in the COST 249 (Continuous Speech Recognition Over the Telephone) and COST 278 (Spoken Language Interaction in Telecommunication) EU actions on speech recognition in telecommunications and was an active participant in the CATCH-2004 EU project and more recently in MobiLife.

Publications

I have more than 20 publications in international conferences and workshops. Here are some references from different times and fields.

1. Alan Liu, Jun Yang, Péter Pál Boda (2009), "Gesture Recognition via Continuous MaxEnt Training of Accelerometer Data", International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2009), San Francisco, USA, April 13-16, 2009

2. Min Mun, Sasank Reddy, Katie Shilton, Nathan Yau (UCLA), Péter Boda (Nokia Research Center), Jeff Burke, Deborah Estrin, Mark Hansen, Eric Howard, and Ruth West (UCLA) (2009), "PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, as a Platform for Participatory Sensing Systems Research", MobiSys 2009, 7thAnnual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Kraków, Poland, June 22-25, 2009

3. Guang Yang, Zhigang Liu, Karim Seada, Hawk-Yin Pang, August Joki, Jun Yang, Daniela Rosner, Manish Anand, Péter Pál Boda (2008), Social Proximity Networks on Cruise Ships, Mobile Interaction with theReal World (MIRW) Workshop at MobileHCI’2008, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, September 2008

4. Tarek Abdelzaher, Yaw Anokwa, Péter Pál Boda, Jeff Burke, Deborah Estrin, Leonidas Guibas, Aman Kansal, Sam Madden, Jim Reich (2007). “Mobiscopes for HumanSpaces”, IEEE Pervasive Computing, April-June 2007

5. Péter Pál Boda (2006), "A Contextual Multimodal Integrator", International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI’2006,Banff, Canada, November 2-4, 2006.

6. Péter Pál Boda & Ed Filisko (2004), "Virtual Modality: a Framework for Testing and Building Multimodal Applications". HLT/NAACL2004 Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Systems, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, May 7, 2004

7. Péter Pál Boda (2004), "MaximumEntropy Based Approach for Multimodal Integration". Sixth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI'04), Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA, October 13^th-15^th, 2004

8. Péter Pál Boda & Saija Lemmelä (2002), “Efficient Combination Of Type-In And Wizard-Of-Oz Tests In Speech Interface Development Process”, ICSLP'20027^th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Denver, USA, September 16-20, 2002.

9. Péter Pál Boda (1997), “From stochastic speech recognition to understanding: an HMM-based approach”, ASRU’97- IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition & Understanding, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 14-17. December, 1997

Patents

Owner and co-owner of five patents and several pending applications.