An Annual Holiday Event for the Whole Family

co-sponsored by SCV-SSCS Chapter

Date: Thursday, December 15, 2011

6:00pm: Networking/Light Holiday Dinner
7:00pm: Presentation
8:30pm: Adjourn

Cost: $7 for adults, free for kids and pre-college students

Title

The future of Gesture Recognition

Speaker

Sinclair Vass, Senior Director of Marketing and Business Operations, JDSU

Abstract

Our annual "family holiday lecture" will address "gesture recognition" - the ability for systems to recognize body movements and interpret them as "commands". We'll have examples of gesture recognition systems for video games and for work applications, and talk about likely future developments in this fast-growing market. This should be interesting for the whole family, so bring kids and spouses. Dinner will be served before the meeting during the networking time, along with bubbling cider and cake.

A quarter century ago, user interfaces took a big step forward from the command line to the mouse. Recent devices from the last year or two let users dispense with the remote control, mouse, trackpad, and pointer, and replace them with "gesture recognition": - one motto is "you are the controller". Some applications for this are fun, such as the use in video game controllers; others look like something out of science fiction movies. We'll talk about how current systems work, the market for them, and what we think is coming over the next few years.

Biography

Sinclair Vass, Senior Director of Marketing, is responsible for driving strategic marketing and marcom activities for the communications and commercial optical products group (CCOP) within JDSU . Sinclair also is a leader of the new market council, and has responsibility for selecting adjacent markets for development, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of internal and external experts that he works with. He leads major initiatives in the optical communications, commercial lasers, solar and consumer markets.

Sinclair previously held the position of Director of Sales for EMEA within JDSU. Prior to JDSU, Sinclair directed sales activity for New Focus's European division from 2000 to 2004. At Lucent Technologies Germany, Sinclair held the role of technical and product market manager from 1994 - 1998, where he managed the technical and commercial design cycle for Lucent's fibre based micro-electronic products in Europe. Prior to his career at Lucent, Sinclair held various product marketing and manufacturing positions at UK-based Hewlett Packard Ltd. within the Fibre Optics Components division from 1994 - 1998. He also served as a research engineer at Plessey Research (Caswell) from 1991 - 1994, with a focus on coherent optical communications.

Sinclair received an MBA from Open University in Milton Keynes, England, and has a BSc in Physics with Honors from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.