Thomas Baudel, PhD
Since 1998, Thomas Baudel is head of user interface research at ILOG, worldwide leader in software components, specializing in visualization, optimization and business rules software components. His work has first focused on user interface toolkit design, to investigate how to integrate novel UI paradigms in existing tools, such as ILOG Views, a leading portable GUI toolkit.
His work now focuses on two domains: how to integrate novel GUI paradigms on nowadays desktops, in a joint project with the University of Paris-Sud, and Information Visualization: a series of publications are planned on a novel declarative approach to information visualization, and ILOG Discovery can be downloaded for evaluation purposes.
In the 1990's decade, Thomas Baudel's research work has focused mostly on the design of GUI toolkits to help the implementation of novel interaction paradigms, and the integration of the dynamics of gesture in the user interface, to help capturing some of the benefits of real-world objects manipulation in abstract information manipulation.
His early work comprise Charade, a computer aided presentation system that captured the hand gestures of a speaker to drive an interactive presentation. The focus was on how to design gesture sets that would convey the user's intention and separate them from the natural gestures made while giving a talk. This work was published in the seminal issue of Communications of the ACM that coined the term "augmented reality" (July 93). T. Baudel has also worked on the design of Toolglass and Magic Lenses with Eric Bier at Xerox PARC. He obtained his PhD at University of Paris-Sud with Ligne Claire, a novel interaction paradigm to edit spline curves using free-hand gestures. He continued exploring gesture based and two-handed interaction paradigms in the Alias|Wavefront user interface research team with Bill Buxton, Gordon Kurtenbach, Georges Fitzmaurice and Ravin Balakrishnan from 1995 to 1998.
Thomas Baudel is Vice-President of AFIHM, the francophone association for Human-Computer Interaction, member of the board of ASTI, the French Association for the Sciences and Technologies of Information processing. He has also held positions in several conference and journal committees since 1995, most notably IHM (Francophone HCI conference), which he co-chairs for its 2002 edition.
Thomas Baudel has also taught Object Oriented Databases, Human Computer Interaction, GUI toolkit design and Computer Graphics in various university and engineering schools. Prior to entering a research careeer, Thomas Baudel worked as an engineer for ACI on database programming, and started his own consulting firm, le point sur le i, which was ceased in 1994.