News & Events

Karrie Karahalios is an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Illinois where she heads the Social Spaces Group. Her work focuses on the interaction between people and the social cues they perceive in networked electronic spaces. Of particular interest are interfaces for pubic online and physical gathering spaces such as chatrooms, cafes, parks, etc. The goal is to create interfaces that enable users to perceive conversational patterns that are present, but not obvious, in traditional communication interfaces.

Pete leads product and service innovation for Walgreens Personalization and CRM team through evidence based design leadership that delivers a return on investment via a return on behavior. As a UX Manager, Pete empowers individuals and teams across diverse organizations to translate behavioral needs of target customers and patients into connected products, designs, and services.

Jason Hong is an associate professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute, part of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He works in the areas of ubiquitous computing and usable privacy and security, and his research has been featured in the New York Times, MIT Tech Review, CBS Morning Show, CNN, Slate, the World Economic Forum, and more. Jason is an associate editor for IEEE Pervasive Computing and ACM Transactions on Human Computer Interaction, and is on the editorial board for CACM (Web site) and Foundations and Trends in HCI.

Dr. Molly Wright Steenson is an associate professor in the CMU School of Design. She is the author of the forthcoming book Architecting Interactivity (MIT Press, 2017). She also leads the Doctor of Design (DDes) program and has a courtesy appointment with the School of Architecture. Prior to CMU, she was an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an adjunct faculty member at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and a resident associate professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy in the early 2000s.

Dr. Majidi is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he started as an assistant professor in 2011. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory (2009-2011) and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (2007-2009). His experience in solid mechanics and microfabrication is the foundation of his current research in the emerging fields of soft robotics and active multifunctional materials.

Jack D. Hidary is a research scientist focusing on AI and on quantum computing at Alphabet's X, formerly Google X. He and his group develop and research algorithms for NISQ-regime quantum processors as well as create new software libraries for quantum computing. In the AI field, Jack and his group focus on fundamental research such as the generalization of deep networks as well as applied AI technologies.

Mike Christel is a Senior Systems Scientist in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. For the past several years he has worked on interface development and evaluation for CMU’s Informedia Project, which makes use of speech, image and natural language processing to enable efficient access to relevant video segments from a large multi-terabyte digital video library. This work includes designing and building video surrogate interfaces like thumbnails, storyboards and skims, empirically investigating their effectiveness. Dr.

Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products, Google Marissa Mayer has been with Google since June 1999 and is currently Director of Consumer Web Products and Product Manager for Google.com. Formerly the technical lead for the user-interface team, she has spearheaded almost every user-interface change to Google’s website in the past four years. While at Google, she has worked on search classification, the Google web directory, image search, Google News.

John M. Carroll is Edward Frymoyer Chair Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include methods and theory in human-computer interaction, particularly as applied to networking tools for collaborative learning and problem solving, and the design of interactive information systems. His book include Making Use (MIT Press, 2000), HCI in the New Millennium (Addison-Wesley, 2001), Usability Engineering (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2002, with M.B.

Amy Pavel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin. Prior to joining UT, Pavel was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and a Research Scientist at Apple. She obtained her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her research in Human-Computer Interaction focuses on designing, building and evaluating new interactive systems driven by Artificial Intelligence. Her primary research goal is to make technology-mediated communication more efficient and accessible.