News & Events

Scott Weiss, Principal and Founder of Usable Products Company, is an information architect, usability expert, and author of “Handheld Usability” (John Wiley 1989 to 1996 designing software and managing software projects. H& Sons, June 2002). He held positions in the software industry. His former employers include Microsoft, Apple, Sybase, and Autodesk. He is the chair of the New York City chapter of ACM SIG CHI, the Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction. He also co-chairs the New York Software Industry Alliance’s HCI SIG.

Nikol Rummel studied psychology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg since 1995. In 2002 she finished her Diploma in Psychology there. In 1998 she received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. During the stay in Madison, her research focus was in the area of “Cognitive Science Applied to Education”. She worked with Professor Sharon Derry and Professor Joel Levin.

Jonathon Cummings is an Associate Professor of Management at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. He spent three years at the MIT Sloan School of Management as an Assistant Professor after completing his dissertation and post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University. During graduate school he interned at Intel (studying collaborative software) and at Motorola (studying knowledge management). He has an undergraduate degree in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in social psychology from Harvard University.

Takayuki Kanda is a Senior Research Scientist at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. He received his B. Eng, M. Eng, and Ph. D. degrees in computer science from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. He is one of the starting members of Communication Robots project at ATR. He has developed a communication robot, Robovie, and applied it in daily situations, such as peer-tutor at elementary school and a museum exhibit guide.

Richard Scheines is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, as a well as a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery. His primary Research focus is on the relations between causal knowledge and statistical data, but he has been active in educational computing since the late 1980s, when he developed an intelligent tutor for Formal Logic.

Professor Barry Wellman studies networks: community, communication, computer, and social. His research examines virtual community, the virtual workplace, social support, community, kinship, friendship, and social network theory and methods. Based at the University of Toronto, he directs the NetLab, teaches at the Department of Sociology, does research at the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, the Knowledge Media Design Institute, and the Bell University Laboratories’ Collaborative Environment Lab, and is a cross-appointed member of the Faculty of Information Studies.

Susan Straus is a Behavioral Scientist at RAND and Adjunct Associate Professor in the HCII. Dr. Straus’s research addresses the social impacts of information and communication technologies. Specific research interests include applications of information technology in health care settings and adoption and use of collaborative technologies for distributed teams.

Paul Leonardi (Ph.D. Stanford University) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, and (by courtesy) Management and Organizations at Northwestern University where he holds the Breed Junior Chair in Design.

Pedro Lopes is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Pedro focuses on integrating computer interfaces with the human body—exploring the interface paradigm that supersedes wearable computing. Some of these new integrated-devices include: muscle stimulation wearable that allows users to manipulate tools they have never seen before or that accelerate their reaction time, or a device that leverages the sense of smell to create an illusion of temperature.

Leah Buechley is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the High-Low Tech research group. The High-Low Tech group explores the integration of high and low technology from cultural, material, and practical perspectives, with the goal of engaging diverse groups of people in developing their own technologies. She is a well-known expert in the field of electronic textiles (e-textiles), and her work in this area includes developing the LilyPad Arduino toolkit.

Narges Mahyar is an Assistant Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently she holds a position as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. Narges’s research falls at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization, Social Computing, and Design. She designs, develops, and evaluates novel social computing and visualization techniques that help people explore, understand, and make data-informed decisions.