I was born and I spent my first 25 years of life in Bucharest, Romania.
During my high school and university years I mainly focused on "exact" sciences.
After getting my degree in Control Engineering at the "Politehnica" University in
Bucharest, I got a scholarship from University of New Hampshire in USA and I
moved there in August 1996 to pursue a PhD degree in Computer Science.
However, at some point in 1998 I decided it was time for me to get out in the
real world :-), so instead I got my MSc degree and started working for
Nokia Research Center in Burlington, MA, USA (near Boston).
During my study years at UNH, I also taught C programming, worked as a
software developer for the Space Science Center at UNH and had an internship
and research assistanship with Lucent Technologies. I was
lucky to meet some really good professors at UNH and got to appreciate AI and
its various areas.
I worked for Nokia Research for 8 years, from 1999 to 2007,
first in Burlington and then in Helsinki, Finland. I started by working
in smart environments and intelligent agents. Over years I held various
positions, like Research Engineer, Senior Research Engineer and
Research Manager. My work and interests in smart enviroments and
inteligent applications made me work on all sorts of "enabling" user-centred
technologies, like context aware computing, affective computing,
reasoning/inferencing algorithms, software agents, machine learning,
Semantic Web, sensing, RFID, personal media management, etc. Besides
the actual research work, my NRC activities also included research "selling"
tasks, e.g., internal workshops, meeting various business and R&D
people, creating and contributing to visions and strategies in NRC and
Nokia. One of the highlights of my job was that I got to know and work
with really inspiring academics, such as Prof. Roz Picard, Prof. Mitchel
Resnick, and Leo Burd from MIT Media Lab, Prof. Gregory Abowd and his
group at Georgia Tech, Prof. Henning Schulzrinne and Knarig Arabshnian
from Columbia University, Prof. Anind Dey from CMU, Prof. Kaisa
Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila from Tampere University, and many others.
During the years spent on working in and understanding
context awareness I came to the conclusion that the only way to build
such solutions is by taking a multidisciplinary approach. Lots of the
technologies required to create intelligent systems are there but for
one reason or another these products either cannot be deployed or they
are not used. For example, the majority of advanced features on devices
are not used at all by people. It sometimes happens because they are
not trivial to use but most of the times it is because they do not
address a real need of the users. It is for that reason that lots of advanced
features are currently being introduced in very specialized areas like people with
disabilities, chronic diseases, elderly people, etc.
For the past years I realized I needed to focus on better
understanding what "moves" people, how can a novel product become
something you keep using over and over, how can technologists work
together with other areas to better understand what people really want,
and how to adapt over time, over different situations and over
different people. I believe emotion and context awareness mixed with other user
understanding areas will allow technologists to create better solutions.
So, in order to be able to better focus on this type of research, I left my
job at NRC, moved to UK together with my husband and I started a PhD at
University of Essex in January 2008. I am currently part of the School of
Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (SCSEE).
My PhD topic is about how technologies can support people in better
understanding themselves by collecting user data and correlating it, by
interpreting and using engaging visualizations and by interacting with the user
3 granted patents, 12 patent applications pending.
My main hobbies are painting, photography, music and reading.
Updated 5 March 2009 by Dana Pavel