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.

  • To ease the friction caused by reduced in-person interaction, a team of HCII researchers created a Slack application called Nooks that helps initiate casual conversations and create affinity groups in an online workspace.

    Reviving Office Chatter

    Researchers Design Tool to Enhance Workplace Socialization in Remote, Hybrid Arrangements About one-third of our lives are spent at...

  • Zeno combines a Python API with an interactive user interface, which empowers users to explore, visualize and analyze data and ML model performance across custom use cases.

    CMU Researchers Release Zeno for Machine Learning Model Evaluation

    A team of Carnegie Mellon University researchers has released a new interactive platform for data management and machine learning (M...

  • Carnegie Mellon logo (red text) and CHI 2023 logo (a red and yellow sailboat)

    CMU at CHI 2023

    The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems will take place from April 23-28, 2023, in Hamburg, Germany. Commonly k...

  • Funding from Amazon SURE will support three SCS summer research initiatives on campus, including Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Software Engineering (REUSE). The REUSE 2022 cohort is shown above.

    CMU, Amazon Expand STEM Summer Research Programs for Underrepresented Students

    Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and Amazon are working together to expand the university's summer research p...

  • SCS faculty members Andrej Risteski, Wenting Zheng, Jun-Yan Zhu, Matthew O'Toole (top), Sauvik Das, Zhihao Jia, Dimitrios Skarlatos and Hirokazu Shirado (bottom) have received NSF CAREER Awards totaling more than $4.5 million.

    SCS Faculty Receive More Than $4.5M in NSF CAREER Awards

    Eight Carnegie Mellon University researchers in the School of Computer Science recently earned Faculty Early Career Development Prog...

  • Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created soft robots that can seamlessly shift from walking to swimming.

    Researchers Develop Soft Robot That Shifts From Land to Sea With Ease

    Most animals can quickly transition from walking to jumping to crawling to swimming if needed without reconfiguring or making major ...

  • a rabbit and a turtle are the icons often referenced when representing fast versus slow; here a real rabbit and real turtle are facing each other

    The Myth of the Fast Learner

    Learning science experts from Carnegie Mellon University's Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) wanted to know why some stude...

  • HCII faculty member Chris Harrison earned the UIST Lasting Impact Award for his 2011 work on OmniTouch, a wearable system that turns everyday surfaces into an interactive screen.

    Harrison Earns Lasting Impact Award for Turning Everyday Surfaces Into Touch Screens

    Good technology takes time to get right. When widespread use of touch screens skyrocketed around 2007, for example, the research had...

  • SCS will take part in the CMU Rales Fellows Program, a transformative initiative announced by CMU and the Norman and Ruth Rales Foundation to increase access to STEM graduate education and help cultivate a new generation of domestic national STEM leaders.

    SCS Part of Groundbreaking Initiative To Broaden Access to STEM Education by CMU, Rales Foundation

    $150 Million Investment Aims To Eliminate Cost as Barrier to Graduate Education, Create Distinctive Ecosystem To Ensure Success The...

  • Researchers in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute engineered a biodegradable seed carrier, fashioned from wood veneer, that could enable aerial seeding of difficult-to-access areas.

    Engineered Magic: Wooden Seed Carriers Mimic the Behavior of Self-Burying Seeds

    How seeds implant themselves in soil can seem magical. Take some varieties of Erodium, whose five-petalled flowers of purple, pink o...

  • HCII Professor Robert Kraut and his co-authors earned the CSCW's most recent Lasting Impact Award for their 1988 paper, "Patterns of Contact and Communication in Scientific Research Collaboration."

    Kraut Earns Lasting Impact Award for Paper on Proximity's Role in Collaboration

    Zoom, Slack and Google Docs may be ubiquitous in today's workplace, but that wasn't the case 35 years ago. Yet many of the technolog...

  • Brad Myers has been named the new Charles M. Geschke Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 1987.

    Myers Named HCII Director

    Martial Hebert, dean of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (SCS), has appointed Brad Myers as the new Charles M...

  • Jason Hong

    Hong Named 2022 ACM Fellow

    Professor Jason Hong from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science has been recognized a fellow of the Association ...

  • SCS faculty members are part of a CMU team that received an NSF Future of Work grant to investigate how AI-augmented learning can help accelerate student progress in community college IT courses. (Photo courtesy of CCAC.)

    CMU Professors Awarded NSF Future of Work Grant

    Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has announced that a team of professors from the School of Computer Science (SCS) and the Heinz Col...

  • CMU Center for Transformational Play wordmark

    Carnegie Mellon University Launches Center for Transformational Play

    Games can entertain. They can bring people together. They can transport players to new worlds, test skills and strategies, and encou...

  • group photo of the 2022 summer researchers on the stairs in the NSH atrium

    HCII Seeks Applicants for 2023 Summer Research Program

    Application now available for Summer 2023 About the Program Carnegie Mellon's Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Human-Com...

  • Bloomwood Stories, an HCII-designed video game that helps members of underresourced or historically marginalized populations feel more confident handling health issues, won the Best Student Award at last month's International Conference on Meaningful Play.

    Video Game Focused on Community Health Receives Award at Meaningful Play Conference

    One of the most enduring pieces of advice from beloved children's television host Mister Rogers is to look for the helpers.  ...

  • CMU and Simcoach Games have teamed up to give high school students interested in game design on-the-job training and a first step toward a career in the field. (Photo courtesy of Simcoach Games.)

    CMU Helps Simcoach Games Train Next Generation of Change Innovators

    Carnegie Mellon University and Simcoach Games have teamed up to give high school students interested in game design on-the-job train...

  • 2 side by side images: left side has 2 neuroscience students writing on whiteboard, right side has screen capture of a videogame. The words "Brain Play" are in the center of the graphic.

    Neuroscientists and Game Designers Play Well Together

    Jessica Hammer thinks the most important technology for making games is the brain.

  • Research into generative models that can create images like these sinister cats is just one example of some spooky research happening in SCS.

    Spooky SCS: A Round-Up of Chilling Research

    Mutant cats, troll hunting and walking through spiderwebs in a haunted forest — some work in the School of Computer Science is downr...