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Richard W. DeVaul Ph.D.My name is Richard Wayne DeVaul. I was born in the early 1970s in Baltimore, MD. I have an amazing family, including two wonderful parents and two great sisters. I'm president and co-founder of AWare Technologies, a technology company focusing on body-worn sensing, analysis, and communications. We began in early 2004 as a contract research company working for the US Army, DARPA, and Olympic sport organizations, and since 2006 are commercializing our core motion-intelligence intellectual property in corporate wellness. (Rich's CV) I'm an expert in signal processing and real-time statistical classification techniques. This means that I know how to make tiny computers do "thin slicing," as popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's "blink." Its all about extracting the small pieces of information that are most meaningful. Is this person healthy or sick? Is that soldier wounded, healthy, or dead? Did the athlete use correct technique or not? I make systems that figure this out very quickly and with a minimum of complexity. I also know a lot about how people perceive information, how we learn, and distracting vs. helpful interactions.
Prior to founding AWare, I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. I got to the lab in the fall of 1997, right as the tech bubble was starting to peak. It was an incredible time, and I spent the next seven years in that unique combination of heaven and hell that is MIT. In June of 2004 I defended my doctorate and finally graduated with my Ph.D, completing a life-long dream of getting a doctorate from MIT. I spent the last five years of graduate school working on new human-computer interaction techniques for wearable, mobile, and portable applications. My doctoral thesis focuses on the problems associated with wearable memory support technology. It also touches on hardware and software architectures, and low-attention human-computer interaction for wearable computing, including the use of subliminal visual cues for just-in-time memory support. Before I was doing wearables full time, I was a member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group. My subliminal cuing research got a lot of media attention. The project was called the Memory Glasses. You can find a decent, accessible summary of the results and motivation in this USA today article on the Memory Glasses The short version is that I can improve your performance on a memory recall task by a factor of about 63% without distracting you, in fact without you being aware that I'm doing anything at all. Even more interesting is that giving you wrong information subliminally doesn't seem to mess you up. The full story is in the dissertation. If you want a video on the topic, there is a great summary on the Scientific American Frontiers with Allan Alda episode "You Can Make It On Your Own". I also know a lot about hardware and software design, and do a bit of mechanical engineering on the side. I got started working on this for the MIThril project at the MIT Media Lab. In addition to my work, I have an active social life and a number of hobbies. I'm a serious amateur cellist, I do a lot of cycling (both on-road and off), and I practice and teach Kokikai Aikido. I enjoy cooking and photography, though I often feel like I don't devote enough time to either. You can find some of my photos on on this site or on my Smug Mug photoblog. I also do a bit a of drawing and painting. Some of my sketches from a trip to Italy the summer of 2001 are up on the FlorenceInWordsAndPictures page. I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts not far from Porter and Davis Square. I've done published research in subliminal HCI, mathematical modeling, computational neuroscience, and wearable computing systems engineering. I've appeared in articles in the New York Times, the French daily Le Monde, and CNN, in addition to Scientific American Frontiers. You can find a list of some of my peer-reviewed publications here: Richard W. DeVaul publications On October 9 2007 my first US patent, US Patent 7,280,040 was issued. There are a bunch more in progress. These days I'm an invited speaker at academic conferences on the topic of wearable technology for high performance sport and health and wellness.
Identity, Email, and PGPYou can send me email at rich@devaul.net
Current GPG Key and Authentication
My current GPG Key can be found here: http://devaul.org/~rich/gpgkey.txt 25CE 3168 DD4D 8861 B12F 81DB 704C E14E FFD0 73DA I sign most of my email with Gnu Privacy Guard. I don't like public key servers much, but you can find my public key on the web through the following URLs: http://devaul.net/~rich/pgpkey.txt or http://web.media.mit.edu/~rich/pgpkey.txt.
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a drawing from my sketch book
procedural image filtering through
The MIThril 2000 wearable computing
i like classic bicycles |
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Here is a one-take recording of me playing the Sarabande from the 1st Bach Cello Suite.
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Me playing the Prelude from the 1st Bach Cello Suite.
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Visual Art
Aesthetics and Hacking
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Music
Other links
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