FIGLAB Wins Four Awards in One Week
News
The HCII's Future Interfaces Group (FIGLAB), led by Assistant Professor Chris Harrison, won four awards this past week for its research into sensing and interface technologies that make interactions between humans and computers more fluid, intuitive and powerful.
The group earned two honors at the 28th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, held Nov. 8–11 in Charlotte, N.C. First-year Ph.D. student Yang Zhang brought home a Best Talk Nomination for his presentation "Tomo: Wearable, Low-Cost, Electrical Impedance Tomography for Hand Gesture Recognition," while Ph.D. student Gierad Laput earned a Best Talk Award for "EM-Sense: Touch Recognition of Uninstrumented, Electrical and Electromechanical Objects" — work done in collaboration with Disney Research.
Accolades for the group's work continued at the 17th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, held Nov. 9–13 in Seattle, where "Gaze+Gesture: Expressive, Precise and Targeted Free-Space Interactions" won Best Student Paper. The work was presented by Ishan Chatterjee, a Harvard undergraduate who worked in FIGLAB this past summer.
Finally, Zhang picked up a Best Short Paper award at the 2015 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces for "Quantifying the Targeting Performance Benefit of Electrostatic Haptic Feedback on Touchscreens." The conference, which just concluded, took place in Madeira, Portugal.
"I'm incredibly proud of my students and the excellence they bring to their work," Harrison said. "They are great ambassadors for CMU and the field of human-computer interaction in general."