Eric A Hulteen

Table of Contents:

Edited on Monday 22 May 2023.
My email address is eric at hulteen dot com.
The rest of the Hulteens can be found at Hulteen.COM.
The photograph to the right is from 2022.

2022 photograph of Eric

Work

I'm currently looking for work in the area of alternative energy; particularly off-grid energy systems design. I have an Off-Grid Energy section on this page on that topic.

My professional field, that I worked in for many decades, is human-computer interaction design (a.k.a., user experience design).

I was, until late 2020, a User Experience Design Lead at Salesforce in San Francisco. I arrived at Salesforce through their acquisition of griddable.io where I was a senior staff interaction designer.

Through September 2017, I worked for VMware in the user experience design group on the vSphere application, the "operating system" that allows you to manage datacenter virtual computing environments.

From 2005 to 2009 I worked for Seagate Technology doing user interface design. You might ask what user interface there is for disk drives, but I didn't work on disk drives—I worked on the software that comes with the retail, branded products that Seagate sells (e.g., external disk drives, NAS drives, and web services).

Prior to that I worked for Mirra, Inc., a startup that sold a personal server for your local network. This server continuously backed up folders you specified (from any computer on your network) and allowed you to share those folders with other people on your network or the web. In September of 2005 Mirra was acquired by Seagate.

In 2000 I formed Aryk Web Design with Kyra Rice in order to apply my professional skills and interests to designing people's interactive experience on the web. Aryk Web Design was dedicated to a simple idea — that web sites and computer applications should be focused on providing a satisfying, productive, and (dare we say) even pleasant experience for people. Aryk Web Design was dissolved in 2002.

Prior to 2000 I did research in human-computer interaction at several labs. Much of that research has been on conversational interaction between people and computers; making computers capable of having spoken conversations with people. Beginning in 1998 I worked as a Member of the Research Staff at Interval Research Corp. Interval was disbanded by its owner, Paul Allen , in April of 2000.

From 1985 to 1997 I worked at Apple in the Advanced Technology Group (ATG); most of that time in the Human Interface Group. Eventually I ended up in the Intelligent Systems Program in ATG until September of 1997 when Apple (in the form of Steve Jobs upon his return to Apple) terminated the entire Advanced Technology Group. It said on my Apple business card that I was a Spoken-Language Interaction Designer. I had another Apple business card that said "Director, Off-Planet Operations." So much for business cards.

Prior to Apple I worked at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California and at Atari, Inc. in the Systems Research Lab in Sunnyvale, California. I'll write more about those experiences at some point.

I have a Master's degree from MIT in human-computer interaction as well an undergraduate degree from MIT in architectural design. I did my human-computer interaction research in an MIT lab with the interesting name of the Architecture Machine Group — now it's called the MIT Media Lab. At the Architecture Machine I worked on a number of projects, some of which were documented in videos (listed below) that have been posted on the web. The first three of these projects I co-designed and co-implemented with Chris Schmandt. On the last project (Spatial Data Management System) I designed and implemented only the speech interface shown in the middle of the video.

Publications

"Interaction and Feedback in a Spoken-Language System: A Theoretical Framework." (PDF file)
S.E. Brennan and E.A. Hulteen.
In Knowledge-Based Systems. March, 1995. pp. 143 - 151.

"VoiceNotes: A Speech Interface for a Hand-Held Voice Notetaker."
L.J. Stifelman, B. Arons, C. Schmandt and E.A. Hulteen.
In Proceedings of INTERCHI '93 (ACM SIGCHI '93). pp. 179 - 186.

"User-Centered Design and Voice-Interactive Applications."
E.A. Hulteen.
In Proceedings of AVIOS (American Voice I/O Society), 1991, pp. 4 - 8.

"Integrating Speech into the User Interface."
E.A. Hulteen.
In Proceedings of AVIOS, 1990, pp. 41 - 45.

"Gestures in Human-Computer Communication."
G. Kurtenbach and E.A. Hulteen.
In Laurel, Brenda, Ed., The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., May 1990.

"The Interface to Design."
E.A. Hulteen.
In Whitney, Patrick, Ed., Design in the Information Environment.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1985, pp. 56 - 65.

"The Intelligent Voice-Interactive Interface." (PDF file)
C. M. Schmandt and E. A. Hulteen.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
March 16 - 17, 1982, Gaithersburg, MD. New York: ACM, 1982, pp. 363 - 366.

Patents

Providing Batch Operations with an Auxiliary User Interface
United States Patent Application 20140282141 (Filing Date: March 14, 2013)

User Interface System Having Programmable User Interface Elements
Patent number 5202828 (issued April 13, 1993) and continued as patent number 5341293 (issued August 23, 1994)

Character-Based Correction Arrangement with Correction Propagation
Patent number 5761687 (issued June 2, 1998)

Hiking (most recent first)

Off-Grid Energy

As I mentioned above, I'm currently looking for work in the area of alternative energy; particularly off-grid energy systems design. I have a fair amount of experience in this area as I've lived off-grid since 2013 and redesigned and rebuilt my own off-grid energy system several times. Also, I was a licensed electrician before I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study architecture and human-computer interaction.

In the first half of 2022 I designed and built a ground-mount solar array to support 150 sq. ft. of solar panels and a shed to hold my batteries, inverter, solar charge controllers, monitoring equipment, generator, & charger.

This section of the page will grow significantly in the future; this is a placeholder for now.

Travel (most recent first)

History

I've lived in California since 1982 but I was born in Boston and grew up in one of its southeastern suburbs, a town named Weymouth. I graduated from Weymouth South High School in 1971.

Thoughts

Occasionally, I have a thought (or a mental paroxysm or a rant) that I want to get out of my system. This page, titled Thoughts is a blog-like page that I created to contain those short opinions that I wanted to share with anyone that cared to read them.

Water

Water is an important element for me — on which I spend a fair amount of time, in one way or another. This section about water outgrew this page so, as of September 1998, you can visit A Personal Discourse on Water.

Driving / Riding

Eric on his motorcycle The control of motion is one of the things that I enjoy about water, and that interest is reflected in the pleasure I take from driving. Driving is an exercise in dynamic flow control; making decisions quickly that take into account the relative velocities and probable trajectories of all the vehicles with respect to each other and to the terrain. It's about fluid motion. I enjoy both driving and seeing new places in the world, and particularly the transitions from place to place. I've driven back and forth across the United States four or five times.

In the spring of 2002 I bought a motorcycle — a Triumph Speed Four. That's me in the picture to the right. I've started a separate web page for other pictures of Eric's Triumph Speed Four .

XB-70 "Valkyrie"

XB-70 I'm fascinated by an experimental airplane from the 1960s, the XB-70 "Valkyrie" built by North American Aviation. It was originally designed as a high-altitude bomber for the Air Force that could fly three times the speed of sound (faster than a bullet) at 70,000 feet. When the bomber program was cancelled NASA took over the two planes to do research on high speed, high altitude flight and aerodynamic and thermal loads.

Only two XB-70s were built, at a cost that exceeded the value of their weight in gold. One of these, tail number 20207, crashed on June 8, 1966 and the other, tail number 20001, was retired to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio on February 4, 1969.

The XB-70 had its horizontal stabilizers forward of the wings and the wing tips folded down so that it could gain lift by surfing on its own supersonic shockwave (a phenomenon known as "compression lift"); it was the original, real "shockwave rider". Visit the NASA XB-70A Valkyrie Photo Collection.

List of My Web Pages

So that they're all collected together in one place, here are links to the other web pages that I've created for this site: