News & Events
THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING WELCOMES NEW FACULTY MEMBER BENJAMIN LOK
October 7, 2003
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Most people would not put ice hockey goalie and computer science professor in the same sentence, but new Assistant Professor Benjamin Lok breaks tradition by being both. He's an articulate, charismatic and ambitious young man who joined the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) faculty at the University of Florida fall semester 2003.
"I found that teaching was a labor of love for me," Lok said. "I also enjoy mentoring students, which enables me to make more of an influence than I could have in an industrial setting." Lok enjoys the energy of the students, which he says has made him even more excited about his areas of expertise, interactive computer graphics and human-computer interaction. "The students here have a true desire to create things," Lok reports, "which is what I am striving for in taking virtual reality and three-dimensional interaction to new levels."
Lok gets enthusiastic when explaining the societal benefits for the ground-breaking research he (and perhaps a dozen others nationally in the field) is currently doing. Lok is working on how to interact both input and output with life-sized digital characters and three-dimensional virtual worlds. Lok's applications will enable people to interact with existing technology-think phone lines and television sets-to solve a plethora of communication problems. "When a person who is deaf can look at his TV and do sign language with a digital character, imagine the possibilities," Lok explains. "Think of a person who stutters being able to interact with a non-anxiety producing cartoon character on his TV to practice his speech in complete privacy."
The
human-computer interaction solutions he is developing will have almost limitless
implications that could be used, for example, by elderly persons who find
navigating a mouse and PC too complex. Rather than type, they would have a
verbal conversation with a digital character on their TV who would let them
know, "You have e-mail" and other information. "When you work with graphics,
pictures, and sounds, you are uniquely able to help people," Lok summarizes.
And with a smile, Lok adds that he has a passion for poker and would love
to create a way to learn-via this type of computerized personal interaction-how
to read non-verbal gestures prevalent in competitive professional poker.
Lok is well-qualified to develop solutions in computer science. His Ph.D. advisor was Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., who is one of the major founders of computer science and won the Turing Award, which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science. Lok gained additional expertise while doing post-Doctoral work under Larry Hodges, a pioneer in using virtual reality for clinical psychology applications.
Lok's current research overlaps with the cognitive psychology of how people interact with digital characters, and being at a university with the depth of UF will allow him to pursue interdisciplinary research streams combing technological aspects of new computer interfaces with human psychology. (He cautions that soon a life-sized digital character will be projected onto a wall in his office and he'll be documenting visitors' reaction to it.)
With a string of academic accomplishments that include having received
both a National Science Foundation Fellowship and Link Foundation Fellowship
in Advanced Simulation and Training while pursuing his Ph.D. at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, you can bet he'll be successful in reaching
his goals at CISE.
Writer: Terri Bailey, 352-373-1041, TBailey567@aol.com
Source: Benjamin Lok, 352-392-1492, lok@cise.ufl.edu
Benjamin Lok's webpage: www.cise.ufl.edu/~lok/
