News & Events
You're in the right place to keep up with department news and upcoming events at the HCI Institute.
View our recent news stories below. Looking for an upcoming event? Visit our website calendar to view our public events, including our weekly Seminar Series on Friday afternoons.
Design of Disney’s Toontown Online
Jesse Schell is a Professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon, specializing in Game Design. Formerly, he was Creative Director of the Walt Disney Imagineering VR Studio, where his job was to invent the future of interactive entertainment for the Walt Disney Company. Jesse worked and played there for seven years as designer, programmer, and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest (Disney’s chain of VR entertainment centers).
Seminar: Post Doctoral Fellows
A wealth of data and a poverty of coordination: The impact of misaligned priorities in a cyberinfrastructure project
Thomas A. Finholt. Dr. Finholt is the director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work, at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, where he is also a research associate professor. He received his Ph.D. in social and decision sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and his B.A. with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1983. Dr. Finholts current research focuses on the design, deployment, and use of cyberinfrastructure in science and engineering.
HCII PhD Thesis Defense: Siyan Zhao, "Understanding the Effect of Everyday Social Interactions on Well-Being"
Who Am I If a Robot Can Do My Job? Identity’s Impact on Pre-Implementation Sensemaking and Subsequent Use of New Technology
Pamela J. Hinds is an Associate Professor with the Center on Work, Technology, & Organization in the Department of Management Science & Engineering, Stanford University. She conducts research on the effects of technology on groups. Much of her research has focused the dynamics of geographically distributed work teams, particularly those spanning national boundaries. Most recently, Pamela has been conducting research on professional service robots in the work environment, examining how people make sense of them and how they affect work practices.
PhD Thesis Proposal: Haojian Jin
Meta-Design: Putting Owners of Problems in Charge
Gerhard Fischer is a Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research is focused on new conceptual frameworks and new media for learning, working, and collaboration; human-computer interaction; cognitive science; distributed intelligence; social creativity; design; meta-design; domain-oriented design environments; and universal design (assistive technologies).
SCS4ALL Preregistration Event
ADAPTS: Towards Adaptive Web-based Performance Support Systems
Peter Brusilovsky is an Assistant Professor of Information Science and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also an adjunct research scientist at HCII. He received his MS degree (1983, Applied Mathematics) and Ph.D. degree (1987, Computer Science) from the Moscow State University. In 1996–1998 he was a visiting research scientist at HCII working with Professor John Anderson on the project “Creating more versatile intelligent learning environments on the basis of cognitive analysis of knowledge being learned” supported by McDonnell Foundation.
Robotics Thesis Proposal
Telepresence for Art and Learning
Coppin is a Research Fellow (Special Faculty Appointment) through the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU. Coppin also teaches Telepresence Art and Applications within the School of Art, the Human-computer Interaction Institute and the Robotics Institute at CMU.
Societal Computing Thesis Proposal
Towards Usable Web Privacy and Security
Lorrie Faith Cranor is an Associate Research Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She is director of the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS). She came to CMU in December 2003 after seven years at AT&T Labs-Research. She is the author of the book Web Privacy with P3P (O'Reilly 2002) and co-editor of the book Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use (O'Reilly 2005).
Machine Learning Thesis Defense
More or Less than Usable: The ups and downs of addressing emotional and unspoken needs
Matt Beale and his firm Daedalus have helped bring hundreds of successful hardware and software products to market. With a team of researchers, designers, and engineers, the firm solves problems that require the subtle blend of technology and interaction solutions. Matt Beale’s work has been honored with IDEA, MDEA, and Spark awards and has been featured in publications from the Wall Street Journal to Metropolis.
PA AV Summit
Butler Lies: How Media Attributes Shape Deception in Availability Management
Jeremy Birnholtz is an assistant professor in the Departments of Communication and Information Science at Cornell University, as well as the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research aims to improve the usefulness and usability of communication and collaboration tools, via a focus on understanding and exploiting mechanisms of human attention. Jeremy’s work has been published in the ACM CHI, CSCW and Group Proceedings, as well as in Organization Science and JASIST.
HCII PhD Communication Requirement talks
Grounded Innovation: Strategies for Creating Digital Products
Lars Erik Holmquist leads the Mobile Innovations group at Yahoo! Labs in Santa Clara, CA. Previously, he was Professor in Media Technology at Södertörn University and manager of the Interaction Design and Innovation lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. He was a co-founder and research leader at the Mobile Life Centre, a joint research venture between academia and industry hosted at Stockholm University, with major partners including Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, TeliaSonera and the City of Stockholm. He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1996, his Ph.D.