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.
Right Time, Right Place: Applying the discipline of design to the emerging problems facing society
Jon Kolko is an Associate Creative Director at frog design and the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, an educational institution in Texas. He has worked extensively in the professional world of interaction design, solving the problems of Fortune 500 clients.
HCII Seminar Series - Eleanor O'Rourke
Eleanor O'Rourke is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where she co-directs the interdisciplinary Delta Lab. Her research explores the design of novel computational systems to support motivation and learning in STEM domains.
Digital Green: Technology and Social Networks for Agricultural Development
Rikin Gandhi is chief executive officer of Digital Green. Rikin’s interests include sustainable agriculture and technology for socioeconomic development. He co-founded Digital Green as a research project in Microsoft Research India’s Technology for Emerging Markets team and now leads the spin-off of Digital Green that works to amplify the effectiveness of agricultural development globally. Rikin is a licensed private pilot and received patents for linguistic search algorithms that he helped develop at Oracle.
HCII Seminar Series - Jorge Ortiz
Jorge Ortiz is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University. His expertise lies in sensing systems, interaction, and multimodal learning within heterogeneous, densely sensed environments. Dr. Ortiz serves as a Principal Investigator on the recently awarded $26 million NSF Engineering Research Center, the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), which focuses on advancing multimodal inference in outdoor environments.
Visualizing Voice
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.
HCII Graduate Student Appreciation Week
HCII Seminar - Shaun Kane
Walgreens Customer Experience: From "At" to "Through"
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.
Martin Luther King Day; No Classes after 12:30 p.m. (all colleges & all courses; including evening classes)
Session All & Mini-6 Course Withdrawal Grade Deadline
Undergraduate Mini-1 Exam Day
Reading Day
HCII PhD Communication Requirement talks- see details
A Computer Scientist's View of HCI, Systems and Theory
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.
Instrumented and Connected: Designing Next-Generation Learning Experiences
Tovi Grossman is a Distinguished Research Scientist at Autodesk Research, located in downtown Toronto. Dr. Grossman’s research is in HCI, focusing on input and interaction with new technologies. In particular, he has been exploring how emerging technologies, such as wearables, the Internet of Things, and gamification can be leveraged to enhance learning and knowledge sharing for both software applications and real-world physical tasks. This work has led to a number of technologies now in Autodesk products used by millions of users, such as Autodesk Screencast and Autodesk ToolClip™ videos.
HCII Thesis Defense: Jeff Rzeszotarski, "Uncovering Nuances in Complex Data through Focus and Context Visualizations"
Special HCII Seminar: Soft Materials for Human Compatible Machines and Electronics
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.
Information Session for HCI Undergraduate Second Major and Minor
The Big Picture of Quantum Technologies
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.
Development and Evaluation of Digital Video Library Interfaces
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.