Less than two years after joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Prof. Steve Mann has received enough news-media coverage of his wearable computer equipment to satisfy a marketing professional's wildest dreams. Daily newspapers such as the New York Times, The National Post and the Boston Globe, magazines such as Time, Canadian Business and the University of Toronto's alumni magazine, and specialized journals such as The Proceedings of the IEEE and PEN Computing Magazine have drawn Prof. Mann's work in humanistic intelligence to the attention of the world. Perhaps because his smart sunglasses provide an incomparable photo opportunity, Prof. Mann himself features prominently in most of the articles. It doesn't make sense to replace ourselves with computers. I'm going the other way and saying that humanistic intelligence is intelligence that arises from the simple existence of the human being in the computational process.
Computers are really good at some things and humans are good at others.
Based on this philosophy, Prof. Mann, a native of Hamilton, Ont., has spent his life since high school developing computational devices that enhance our senses and expand our awareness of the world around us, from eyeglasses linked to the Internet to shoes that monitor our walking. But he planted an extraordinarily interesting seed, and it grew. In 1996, the first wearable computer conference was held in Seattle, Washington, and the IEEE has conducted international conferences on the topic. The publicity has done more than raise the profile of Prof. Mann's research. It has also generated interest among companies that might finance further refinements of his work.