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.
Mini-2 Course Audit Grade Option Deadline
THESIS DEFENSE: Eliane Wiese
Interactive Visual Tools for Mining Large Graphs
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering, and an Associate Director of the MS Analytics program. Polo holds a PhD in Machine Learning and a Masters in human-computer interaction (HCI). His PhD thesis won Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention. Polo received faculty awards from Google, Yahoo, and LexisNexis, Raytheon Faculty Fellowship, Edenfield Faculty Fellowship, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.
Women in Tech with Karen Holtzblatt
Karen Holtzblatt is best known for creating "Contextual Design,” an industry standard design process that uses extensive field data to understand customers’ needs, tasks, intents, and processes to design products that meet the needs of customers and business. After decades of practice Karen is now working to understand how to keep women in technology fully engaged and successful.
Crowdsourcing Lunch Seminar: Siddarth Suri
Computational Ecosystems: Tech-enabled Communities to Advance Human Values at Scale
Haoqi Zhang is the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Junior Chair of Design and assistant professor in Computer Science at Northwestern University. His work advances the design of integrated socio-technical models that solve complex problems and advance human values at scale.
Situated Interaction in the Open World: New Systems and Challenges
Sean Andrist is a researcher at Microsoft Research AI in the Perception and Interaction Group. His research interests involve designing, building, and evaluating socially interactive technologies that are physically situated in the open world, particularly embodied virtual agents and robots. Sean received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he primarily researched effective social gaze behaviors in human-robot and human-agent interaction.
HCII PhD Thesis Proposal, "Technology-Mediated Help-Seeking Scaffolding for Tablet-Based Early Literacy Instruction in Rural Villages in Tanzania"
Shared visual spaces in computer-mediated communication
Susan Fussell has been a system scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon since 1997 working with Jane Siegel and Robert Kraut. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1990. Her previous positions include member of technical staff in the Interpersonal Communications Group at Bellcore and an assistant professorship in the Psychology Department at Mississippi State University. Dr.
Celebrating 50 Years of Video Calling
Modeling Users with Disabilities Interacting with Computers Through Assistive Technology
Richard Simpson, PhD, ATP, received a BS in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 1992. At the University of Michigan he earned an MS in Bioengineering in 1994, an MS in Computer Science and Engineering in 1995, and a PhD in Bioengineering in 1997. Dr. Simpson was certified as an Assistive Technology Practitioner in 1997. He is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology.
HCII Ph.D. Thesis Proposal: Megan Hofmann, "The GIST of Medical Making: A Framework For Producing Clinical CAD Tools with Generative Design"
Interactive Machine Learning: Leveraging Human Intelligence
Dan R. Olsen Jr. is a Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. He was formerly the director of CMU’s HCI Institute and founding editor of ACM’s Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (TOCHI). For the last 25 years he has been working on software architectures and techniques to support the construction of user interfaces. His most recent work is in human-robot interaction and in architectures that integrate machine learning into the user interface.
PhD Thesis Proposal: Karan Ahuja, "Practical and High-Fidelity User Digitization On-the-Go"
HCI in Living Laboratories
Gregory Abowd is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and GVU Center at Georgia Tech, and co-Director of the Aware Home Research Initiative. His research explores applications of ubiquitous computing technologies, combining both human-centered and technology-driven research themes. Since 1995, Dr.
Theory Lunch Seminar
The ELDeR Project: Designing Pleasurable Technology for Elders
Jodi Forlizzi is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research involves understanding user experience, designing and developing technology products that bring people information in new contexts, and understanding and supporting interdisciplinary design processes. Currently, she is studying how information is communicated effectively in a variety of contexts, using words, pictures, sound, motion, and ambient information, without creating cognitive overload.
Language Technologies Ph.D. Thesis Defense
A framework for data-driven adaptive instruction
Joseph E. Beck is a postdoctoral fellow at CMU in the robotics institute working on Project LISTEN. He received his B.S. in math, computer science, and cognitive science from CMU, and recently received his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in applying machine learning techniques to user modeling and intelligent tutoring construction. His areas of interest include reasoning about users, empirical evaluations, machine learning, and intelligent tutoring systems.