Dr. Rafael "Tico" Ballagas
Alumnus
Tico completed his PhD on interaction techniques, toolkits, and evaluation methods for ubiquitous computing at the Media Computing Group under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers in 2007. To find out what he did next, check out our alumni page.
Tico's research interests lie in the design and implementation of post-desktop user interfaces. Some of his past and current projects include:
Tico graduated with a Master's (M.S.) in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and received his Bachelor's (B.S.) degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA. Tico spent some time in industry working for Motorola developing software for the Pagewriter 2000 (rated number 13 by PC World Magazine in the "50 greatest gadgets in the last 50 years") and the Accompli 009.
Professional Activities
- Organizing Committee: Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices PERMID 2007 at Pervasive 2007
- Organizing Committee: Workshop on Usable Ubiquitous Computing in Next-Generation Conference Rooms: Design, Evaluation, and Architecture (website) at Ubicomp 2006
- Organizing Committee: Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices PERMID 2006 at Pervasive 2006
- Organizing Committee: Workshop on Toolkit Support for Interaction in the Physical World TUIT 2004 at Pervasive 2004
Publications
( denotes a major peer-reviewed publication).
- Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, Jennifer Sheridan and Jan Borchers. The Design Space of Ubiquitous Mobile Input. In Handbook of Research on User Interface Design and Evaluation for Mobile Technologies, IGI Global, Incollection, Hershey, PA, USA, 2008.
- Christine Sutter, Jochen Müsseler, Laszlo Bardos, Rafael Ballagas and Jan Borchers. Transformed movements and perceiving one’s own action. In TeaP 2008, 50. Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen,Mar 2008.
- Rafael Ballagas. Bringing Iterative Design To Ubiquitous Computing: Interaction Techniques, Toolkits, and Evaluation Methods. PhD Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, August 2007.
- Rafael Ballagas and Steffen P. Walz. REXplorer: Using Player-Centered Iterative Design Techniques for Pervasive Game Development. In Pervasive Gaming Applications, 2, pages 22,2007.
- Rafael Ballagas, Faraz Memon, Rene Reiners and Jan Borchers. iStuff Mobile: Rapidly Prototyping New Mobile Phone Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1107–1116, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2007.
- Rafael Ballagas, Steffen P. Walz, Sven Kratz, Claudia Fuhr, Eugen Yu, Martin Tann, Jan Borchers and Ludger Hovestadt. REXplorer: A Mobile, Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists. In CHI '07: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1929–1934, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2007.
- Sven Kratz and Rafael Ballagas. Gesture Recognition Using Motion Estimation on Mobile Phones. In PERMID '07. 3rd Intl. Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices at Pervasive 2007.,2007.
- Steffen P. Walz, Rafael Ballagas, Jan Borchers, Joel Mendoza, Sven Kratz, Christoph Wartmann, Claudia Fuhr, Martin J. Tann, Dong Youn Shin, Bilal Hameed, Laszlo Bardos and Ludger Hovestadt. Cell Spell-Casting: Designing a Locative and Gesture Recognition Multiplayer Smartphone Game for Tourists. In Proc. PERGAMES, Third International Workshop on Pervasive Gaming Applications at PERVASIVE 2006, LNCS, Dublin, Ireland, May 2006.
- Rafael Ballagas, Steffen Walz and Jan Borchers. REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software. In CHI 2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo),April 2006.
- Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, Jennifer Sheridan and Jan Borchers. The Smart Phone: A Ubiquitous Input Device. In IEEE Pervasive Computing, pages 70–77, number 1, Jan-Mar 2006.
- Rafael Ballagas, Faraz Memon, Rene Reiners and Jan Borchers. iStuff Mobile: prototyping interactions for mobile phones in interactive spaces. In Proc. PERMID, Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices at PERVASIVE 2006, LNCS, Dublin, Ireland, 2006.
- Rafael Ballagas and Jan Borchers. Selexels: a Conceptual Framework for Pointing Devices with Low Expressiveness. TechReport, number AIB-2006-16, Dec 2006.
- Rafael Ballagas and Jan Borchers. REXplorer: A mobile, pervasive game for tourists. In ECSCW Workshop on Computer Games & CSCW,September 2005.
- Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs and Jennifer Sheridan. Mobile Phones as Pointing Devices. In Pervasive 2005 Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices (PERMID),Munich, Germany, May 2005.
- Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs and Jennifer Sheridan. Sweep and Point & Shoot: Phonecam-Based Interactions for Large Public Displays. In CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1200–1203, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, April 2005.
- Trevor Pering, Rafael Ballagas and Roy Want. Spontaneous marriages of mobile devices and interactive spaces. In Commun. ACM, pages 53–59, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, number 9, 2005.
- Rafael Ballagas. Patch Panel: Distributed I/O Management for Ubicomp. In UBICOMP Doctoral Colloquium,Nottingham, UK, September 2004.
- Rafael Ballagas, Andy Szybalski and Armando Fox. Patch Panel: Enabling Control-Flow Interoperability in Ubicomp Environments. In PerCom 2004 Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications,Orlando, Florida, USA, March 2004.
- Rafael Ballagas, Kathryn Yu and Stacie Hibino. Taking and Sharing Pictures with Phonecams: An Ethnographic Study. TechReport, 2004.
- Brian Lee, Rafael Ballagas and Maureen Stone. Designing for Latency: In Search of the Balance Between System Flexibility and Responsiveness. In Ubicomp 2003,Seattle, Washington, USA, October 2003.
- Rafael Ballagas, Meredith Ringel, Maureen Stone and Jan Borchers. iStuff: A Physical User Interface Toolkit for Ubiquitous Computing Environments. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 537-544,Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 2003.
- Meredith Ringel, Joshua Tyler, Maureen Stone, Rafael Ballagas and Jan Borchers. iStuff: A Scalable Architecture for Lightweight, Wireless Devices for Ubicomp User Interfaces. In Ubicomp 2002, Conference, September 2002.
- Jan Borchers, Rafael Ballagas and Maureen Stone. iStuff: Searching for the Great Unified Input Theory. In UBICOMP 2002: Ubiquitous Computing, Conference, September 2002.
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Software
QCplugins - open source plugins for Apple's Quartz Composer
iROS X EventSharing iStuff
Other Stuff
Detailed Contact Information (Internal access only)
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