Amazing PhD Student

Uhm... yeah, not me. I just ran across the website of one of the most prolific/interesting (modern) PhD students I've ever seen, Chris Harrison, at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This guy is just... wow. He is what I wanted to be when I was a kid, and what I wish I could be as a grad student (though my field is a bit different from his -- his level of productivity is what I envy at this point, even though his inventions are really, really... just wow...).

Working with his advisor, this 3rd year PhD student has explored many interesting untapped user interface projects, such as 3D-like video chatting and Lean and Zoom, which is a program that checks proximity of the user's head to a computer screen and adjusts the screen zoom accordingly. His ideas for alternative device inputs include the audio-cued Scratch Input, which allows a user to control devices by scratching specific motions into any surface that allows the propagation of sound to a sensor, and the body-acoustics-based Skinput, which I think will take off like a wildfire here soon. He's scheduled to release his paper (and give a demonstration, I imagine) at CHI 2010 in Atlanta on Monday. Check out the links and his site, it's all really impressive.

This guy has really got his stuff together. Check out his research here. Oh, and if that isn't enough to floor you, check out his world travels page. How does he do it?