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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.

  • Servicing the Surface Economy, or: The Loneliness of the Virtual Reality

    Anne Lorimer’s work draws on fine-grained ethnography of linguistic, aesthetic, and other material practices to examine how people construct “reality” and agency in industrial capitalism. Her dissertation “Reality World” was based primarily on her fieldwork among visitors and staff at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, as well as on archival research and oral histories concerning related Chicago 19th and 20th century business spectacles. She holds a Ph.D.

  • Interfaces for Augmenting Face-to-Face Conversation Using Wearable Computers

    Thad Starner is an Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. He is a wearable computing pioneer, having worn a wearable as an everyday personal assistant since 1993. Starner holds four degrees from MIT, including his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory in 1999. Thad has authored over 90 scientific publications on mobile computing, intelligent agents, computer vision, and augmented reality, and Thad’s work focuses on computational assistants for everyday-use wearable computers to segue to practical artificial intelligences.

  • HCII Seminar Series - Leah Buechley

    Leah Buechley is an associate professor in the computer science department at the University of New Mexico, where she directs the Hand and Machine research group. Her work explores integrations of electronics, computing, art, craft, and design. She is a pioneer in paper and fabric-based electronics and her inventions include the LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit for sew-able electronics. Previously, she was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she founded and directed the High-Low Tech group.

  • Context Aware Computing, Understanding and Responding to Human Intention

    Dr. Ted Selker is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media, the Director of the Context Aware Computing Lab, the MIT director of The Voting Technology Project and the Counter Intelligence/ Design Intelligence special interest group on domestic and product-design of the future. Ted’s work strives to demonstrate that peoples intentions can be recognized and respected by the things we design. Context aware computing creates a world in which peoples desires and intentions cause computers to help them.

  • IP Telephony Using SIP and Value-add Using PDAs

    Thomas Gentles is director of engineering for the Internet Communications business within 3Com Corporation’s Business Connectivity Group. He is responsible for research and product development of IP telephony systems and related technologies.

  • Designing With Time

    Dan Boyarski is a communication designer with 30 years in education and the profession. He is Professor of Design at CMU’s School of Design, where he has been for almost 20 years. He teaches courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in typography, information design, and human-computer interaction design. Dan is interested in how words, images, sound, and motion may be combined to produce effective communication. He received an MFA in Graphic Design from Indiana University and later spent two years at the School for Design in Basel, Switzerland.

  • Enriching an Urban Enclave’s Social Capital through Social Computing: A Hierarchy of Explanation

    Quentin Jones is an Assistant Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology in the Department of Information Systems. His research interests are primarily in the area of Social Computing and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Specifically, he is interested in how various social computing system designs can both enable and constrain interpersonal and group interactions, and how the use of such systems can lead to the expansion of social ties/capital. He directs the SmartCampus (NSF Funded) initiative to explore these challenging research questions.

  • Tool, Servant or Coach? Reframing the metaphor of computing

    John Canny is a Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His 1987 Ph.D. was from MIT in robotics, and received the ACM doctoral dissertation award. His research then focused on the interaction between computers and the physical world—robotics, geometry, vision and computational biology. Since the 1990s he has focused on the democratization of computing, and what it means to design systems for the everyday. In 2002, he started the Berkeley Institute of Design, an interdisciplinary, human-centered design research lab. BID now houses 30 researchers from 8 departments.

  • Visible Synthesis

    Katie Minardo Scott is an interaction designer at MAYA Design, in Pittsburgh, PA. Katie has built a diverse portfolio of projects, using human-centered methods to develop pocket-sized medical monitors, explore gesture interfaces for cars, refine imaging software for cardiologists, conduct field research with soldiers, build visualization tools for intelligence analysts, and study the shopping habits of teenage girls. She joined MAYA after a three-year stint at The MITRE Corporation, a government research and development center in Boston.

  • Designing to Enhance Confidence and Innovation

    Liz Gerber is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University. She holds courtesy appointments in the Schools of Management and Education. Liz researches how work practices and technology influences creative problem solving. In 2008, Liz founded Design for America, an award winning, nationwide initiative for college campuses that inspires students to use human centered design to create local and social impact. Previously, Liz taught at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school).

  • HCII Seminar Series - Gregory Abowd

    Gregory D. Abowd is the Dean of the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, where he is also a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with affiliate appointments in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Prior to joining Northeastern in March 2021, Dr. Abowd was faculty in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology for over 26 years, where he held the titles of Regents’ Professor and J.Z. Liang Endowed Chair in the School in Interactive Computing.

  • Usability in the Free/Open Source Software Community

    Michael Terry is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab. His research focuses on developing, deploying, and evaluating new tools to support usability needs in free/open source software development. As part of this research, his group created ingimp, an instrumented version of GIMP that provides the first rich, large-scale characterization of how an open source application is used “in the wild” on a day-to-day basis.