IntuiLab founder and scientific advisor receives Google research grant

Investigation will explore the native support of natural user interfaces in Linux and Linux derivatives like Android 

Toulouse, France – December 21, 2011. IntuiLab, a leader in the design, creation and deployment of innovative multi-touch experiences, is proud to announce that one of its co-founders, Stéphane Chatty, has received a Google Research Award for his work in the field of human-computer interaction. Granted in his capacity as Research Scientist for the Interactive Computing Laboratory at ENAC – the French national aviation university – Chatty will use the award to develop a theoretical framework aimed at extending the Linux input system to natively support natural user interfaces.

An “input system” defines how software applications see input devices and their events: what those events are made of, what they mean, etc. The result is an architecture defining how those events should be formatted for consumption. Currently, the Linux input system is aimed mostly at traditional devices like the mouse and keyboard and thus less suitable for a host of more “natural” – or ubiquitous – interfaces such as gesture, motion, voice, video, temperature, etc. With the grant provided by the Google Research Award, Chatty will pursue the creation of an experimental Linux input system that broadly supports natural user interfaces.

After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique and the University of Paris-Sud with a PhD in computer science, Chatty co-founded IntuiLab in 2002 with colleagues Damien Figarol and Laurent Karsenty. Upon the recruitment of Vincent Encontre as CEO in 2006, Chatty returned to academia, currently acting as Director of the ENAC R&D Labs, while maintaining contact with IntuiLab as their scientific advisor. This relationship with IntuiLab has focused on software architectures for user interfaces and has resulted in the joint filing of a patent on an architecture for supporting multiple, concurrent inputs produced by interactive applications.

“Stéphane’s passion for advancing the science of human-computer interaction is the lifeblood of our company,” says Vincent Encontre. “His commitment to research has produced tremendous results that have not only found their way into IntuiLab’s software but also into the operating systems such as Android used around the world every day. It is quite satisfying to see him receive this recognition he so richly deserves.”

The purpose of the Google Research Awards is to facilitate interaction between Google and academia. The awards are used to support academic research aimed at improving information access. In December 2011, Google awarded over $6 million to 119 projects across 21 different focus areas.

About IntuiLab

Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Toulouse, France, IntuiLab is a global leader in the design, development and deployment of natural user interface-based applications for multimedia agencies and retail. Through IntuiFace, the company’s portable, scalable and extensible surface computing software platform, IntuiLab delivers and deploys applications that bring tangible returns on investment to its clients by providing their customers and users with a more natural, immersive and memorable interactive experience. IntuiLab is a Microsoft and 3M partner and has clients in a wide variety of industries such as consumer goods, banking, telecommunications and hospitality. More information is available at www.intuilab.com. ### If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Vincent Encontre, please send an email to info@intuilab.com.