Klara Nahrstedt is a Computer Science Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose research has spent decades asking a deceptively simple question: how can technology make communication between people feel more real?
Long before that became her career, Klara grew up in a world where communication itself was restricted.
Her mother left Czechoslovakia for Stanford in the late 1960s, expecting the rest of the family would eventually follow. Then the political situation changed and the borders closed. Klara stayed behind and later studied and worked in East Germany.
She remembers living in East Berlin, seeing the Berlin Wall, and knowing she could not cross it. When her mother visited, they eventually had to say goodbye at Friedrichstraße. Her mother could leave. Klara could not.
Even access to scientific information had limits. Klara recalls Western journals that were available only to Communist Party members. If you were outside that system, certain knowledge could remain out of reach.
Then, in January 1990, she left East Germany for the United States. She calls it the best decision she ever made.
America felt almost surreal. After growing up with shortages, she saw aisle after aisle of choices in a Philadelphia grocery store. At the University of Pennsylvania, she encountered computers, networks, and robotics systems far beyond what she had previously used.
That transition led to a career working on high-speed networks, real-time video, tele-immersion, 3D video, virtual reality, augmented reality, and distributed computing.
The challenge is often the same: moving increasingly rich information across networks fast enough that humans do not notice the delay.
Later, Klara helped develop tele-immersion systems where dancers at Illinois and Berkeley could appear in the same virtual 3D environment and perform together thousands of miles apart.
Today, she is thinking about what comes next.
What if a remote student could appear to sit in an empty chair inside a classroom? What if people physically present could meet alongside others rendered into the room through augmented reality? What if the internet could transmit not only video and audio, but touch and even smell?
A digitally generated smell still has to travel through the air to your nose. Haptic systems may require responses faster than ordinary operating systems can provide. Virtual reality must update quickly enough that differences between what your eyes see and your body feels do not make you sick.
At the center of it all is one of multimedia’s hardest questions: what information does a person actually need?
If you are looking at one part of a virtual room, why transmit every pixel in the rest of it at full resolution?
That is where machine learning becomes useful.
But when asked why she has not spent the entire conversation talking about AI, Klara gives a simple answer: AI is a tool.
For her, the mistake is starting with whatever technology is fashionable and then searching for a problem to attach it to. She starts with the problem. If machine learning helps, use it. If the problem requires networking, optimization, computer vision, or distributed systems, use those instead.
She gives similar advice to students: knowing AI alone is not enough. Become useful across several domains. Study outside your major. Read beyond engineering. Travel. Meet people from different cultures. Learn how other people think.
Scientific knowledge matters, but understanding people and knowing how to communicate with them may matter just as much.
Klara grew up in a system where borders separated families and access to information could depend on politics. She came to America and found a world overflowing with information, technology, people, and possibility.
She has spent much of her career trying to remove another kind of distance.
Not the Berlin Wall this time, but the technological distance between one human being and another.
