Chris Schmandt directs the Lab's Living Mobile group. His work is related to the enhancement of personal communication and virtual social awareness, as well as to conversational user interfaces. The Speech Interface group uses speech technologies and portable devices to enhance human communication and to make digitized audio more useful as a data type; its focus is on developing novel applications, user interfaces, and services to exploit computer speech processing for interacting with and through computers far removed from keyboards and monitors. Schmandt is also the coordinator of the Lab's UROP program. He received his BS in computer science and his MS in visual studies, both from MIT.