What if you could type with your eyes? People with limited mobility may have no other choice. But it's slow, currently around 12-18 words per minute. Is that the best we can offer? Scott MacKenzie describes the physiology of the eye and technical limits on eye tracking, his work to evaluate various input methods, and his new approach, the "scanning ambiguous keyboard," that helps some disabled people communicate more freely than ever before.

Everyone has too many distractions and too many fires to put out. How can you stay aware of the status of your systems and prioritize events that interrupt your day? Conrad Albrecht-Buehler presents "Heed": Simpler than a dashboard, but more informative. Less disruptive than an alarm, it helps you keep an eye on your systems and gives you a more usable warning when things are going to blow!

Remote research is cost-effective and produces quick results--and sometimes useful insights that you would not learn from subjects in a controlled setting. Juliette Melton offers practical advice on remote research: How to set it up, useful resources and tools, and how to recruit subjects and put them at ease. This interactive BayCHI session will help you decide when to use remote research and what to expect when you do.

Do great ideas just pop into the heads of lucky geniuses? Getting ideas on a reliable basis is important in a business culture. Brainstorming, although 80 years in existence, is still not well understood. Gayle Curtis explains the rules of brainstorming, or structured ideation, and how proper brainstorming not only promotes ideas, but also promotes a culture of respect, acceptance of points-of-view, and an attitude that continues to foster better ideas.

How can good design reduce coffee cup waste? Or improve prescription drug compliance? When people encounter down sides to our spectacular modern products and services, how can designers create solutions? Brynn Evans and Krista Sanders talk about how to use design thinking to peel apart "squirrelly-wicked problems." Their methods balance the needs of businesses and users to find solutions people are willing to embrace.

For every design decision, a host of factors guide the outcome and subsequent user behavior. Often the factors are not rational or reasonable, but rather based on emotion. Behavioral economists are learning what designers already know instinctively: These emotions can be leveraged in the decision-making moment to achieve a desired behavioral end. David Fetherstonhaugh tells us how designers are using behavioral economics, and why it is successful.

In everyday life, people deal with more identifiers, such as email addresses, than they realize, says Ben Gross, and these identifiers have implications for people's privacy, security, productivity, and quality of life. Discussing recent issues of privacy on the web, Gross considers technologies that track identity and tools that show how identity is tracked.

In the information age, we can collect more data than ever about our lives and activities. But we rarely use that data to effectively drive decisions by government, corporations, or even individuals. Joy Mountford shares examples from her work that show the beauty of data and its visualization.

Wikipedia isn't just a resource created by volunteers, it's also a highly social project, a test-bed for researchers, and a source of valuable data for scientists studying community behavior. This panel features some of the wiki community's top contributors, who present the latest trends, issues, and knowledge from Wikimania, the annual international Wikimedia conference.

Ted Selker is engineer/designer with a rare talent for balancing form and function. Without that balance, the result can be a beautiful product that doesn't work or a wonderfully functional product that nobody wants. In this extemporaneous talk, Ted explains the science and the art behind the IBM Trackpoint and the $100 laptop, among his many other inventions.

Jerry Michalski demonstrates the user interface and features of TheBrain, a concept-map application for your mind. He takes questions from the audience which delve into the deeper implications, uses, and future of the software. For twelve years, Michalski has recorded, connected, and added links to over 112,000 of his thoughts in TheBrain, so he's well placed to discuss how the application helps him organize and access his ideas and how it affects his lifestyle.

What are the key elements that create real player engagement in a game? Nicole Lazzaro, president of XEODesign and expert on emotion and player experience design, identifies where on the emotional map game creators must take us to make their games popular and successful. The games that keep us coming back provide us with more than mere amusement. They challenge, surprise, and relax us while creating opportunities for what we really seek at the end of the day--a chance for social interaction.

Humans are fundamentally visual creatures, so we articulate any problem more clearly with pictures than with words. Whether technology and design, human interactions, process difficulties, financial challenges, or political roadblocks, Dan Roam says simple pictures offer extraordinary clarity and insight. Pictures literally help us see the invisible.

Luke Hohmann thinks teams should engage more productively and creatively in the product design and development process. His career commitment to agile methods complements his latest professional focus: Innovation Games, originally designed as in-person, goal-directed, serious games. Now, Luke is translating the games to a new, on-line, serious gaming platform.

There are many ways to go about consulting, but how do you do it, and how do you do it successfully? Engineer and consultant John Carter says most consulting companies fail because they can not attract the clients who need their services. Failed strategies include calling on their former associates, attending networking events, and cold calling, and waiting for the phone to ring. The key to successful consulting is marketing, not selling.