Oliver Brdiczka manages PARC's Contextual Intelligence research area. He focuses on constructing models for human activity from various sensors -- ranging from PC desktop events to physical activity sensors -- by employing machine learning methods. The goal? To enable context-aware applications and services that understand human activity and anticipate human needs by leveraging derived intent and goals. As part of a Xerox-funded semantic startup incubated at PARC (www.meshin.com) to increase the productivity of today's information workers, Oliver is developing methods for automatically constructing semantic models from people's work patterns using content, temporal patterns, and social relationships.

Before joining PARC, Oliver managed a research area on Ambient Collaborative Learning at Telecooperation Group at TU Darmstadt, Germany and held a lecturer position at Universite Pierre Mendes France at Grenoble. Oliver's research has contributed to several European research projects including IST CAVIAR (Context Aware Vision using Image-based Active Recognition) and IP CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop). His work has also contributed to the U.S. government-funded CALO project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) which resulted in the spinoff Siri, and most recently the DARPA ADAMS project for detecting security threats.

Oliver received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and M.S. in Imagery, Vision, and Robotics from INP Grenoble; engineer's diploma from ENSIMAG, France; and Master's Degree in Computer Science (Diplom-Informatiker) from Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH), Germany. Oliver serves on numerous program committees for international conferences. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of activity recognition, context modeling, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and e-learning, and has received best paper awards for his Ph.D. thesis at INP Grenoble (2007) and papers presented at the IFIP conference on Artificial Intelligence, Applications, & Innovations (2006) and IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (2008).