Past Seminars
The HCII Seminar Series has been a weekly tradition at CMU since 1990. Details of our seminars from 2014 to present, as well as many of their recordings, are available below. A few years ago, we held a year of special programming in celebration of the seminar's 25th anniversary.
| Date | Title | Speaker | Talk title and Abstract |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Challenges and Opportunities for Real-time Ridesharing Services to Address Unemployment Barriers Among Low-Resourced Populations |
Tawanna Dillahunt Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan |
Improved transportation is a key predictor for upward economic mobility, and the relationship between transportation and economic mobility is stronger than that between economic mobility and factors like crime, the percentage of two-parent families, and elementary-school test scores. Real-time… Full Details | |
| Innovators and their Others: Entrepreneurial Citizenship in Transnational India |
Lilly Irani Assistant Professor of Communication & Science Studies, University of California San Diego |
This talk focuses on how valorized forms of work become models of citizenship. Today, the halls of TED and Davos reverberate with optimism that hacking, brainstorming, and crowdsourcing can transform citizenship, development, and education alike. I will examine these… Full Details | |
| CANCELED: Tracking Behavioral Symptoms of Mental Health and Delivering Personalized Interventions Using Mobile and Wearable Devices |
Tanzeem Choudhury Associate Professor, Computing and Information Sciences, Cornell University |
CANCELED: Mobile and ubiquitous computing research has led to new techniques for cheaply, accurately, and continuously collecting data on human behavior that include detailed measurements of physical activities, social interactions and conversations, sleep quality and duration and more. Continuous… Full Details | |
| Predictive Interaction |
Jeffrey Heer Associate Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington |
How might we architect interactive systems that have better models of the tasks we're trying to perform, learn over time, help refine ambiguous user intents, and scale to large or repetitive workloads? In this talk I will present Predictive Interaction, a framework for interactive systems that… Full Details | |
| Asking Technology: A Step Too Far or Not Far Enough? |
Yvonne Rogers Director, UCL Interaction Centre, University College London |
Much of HCI research involves asking people questions, either through interviews, surveys, design sessions, evaluation studies, voting, polling and so on. We choose our methods depending on what we want to find out. However, there is also increasing evidence showing how the use of different media… Full Details | |
| Achieving Real Virtuality: Closing the Gap Between the Digital and the Physical | As digital interaction spreads to an increasing number of devices, direct physical manipulation has become the dominant metaphor in HCI. The promise made by this approach is that digital content will look, feel, and respond like content from the real world. Current commercial systems fail to keep… Full Details | ||
| In A Flash: Crowdsourcing Organizations, Collaborations, and Research | 
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University |
Crowdsourcing envisions computational systems that enable complex collective achievements. However, today's crowdsourcing techniques are limited to goals so simple and modular that their path can be entirely pre-defined. In this talk, I describe crowdsourcing techniques that enable far more complex… Full Details | |
| Participatory Design as a Practice in the Learning Sciences |
Betsy N. Disalvo Assistant Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech |
The goal of the learning sciences is to not only understand the phenomena of learning, but also to impact educational practices and enable more effective learning. To meet these goals, learning scientists use iterative and design methods as they design curriculum… Full Details | |
| Aesthetics of Intelligence: Designing User Experience for Systems of Smart Things |
Lin-Lin Chen Professor, Industrial and Commercial Design, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology |
The vision of a smart environment, where invisible technologies seamlessly support people’s daily activities, is closer to becoming reality. After decades of research, smart things have become commonly available and are being adopted into people’s homes. Despite of the commercial optimism, several… Full Details | |
| Instrumented and Connected: Designing Next-Generation Learning Experiences | The history of computing is rich with examples of how computers, among their many purposes, serve as tools which enhance our ability to learn. As these computing technologies advance, so too do the ways in which we learn. Today, we are moving faster than ever towards Weiser’s seminal vision… Full Details | ||
| Unlocking Data, Unlocking Interaction | 
Associate Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington |
The applications we create are framed by the tools we use to create them. On one hand, tools codify effective practice and empower design. On the other, that same codification eventually constrains design. My research examines new approaches to interactive systems in light of this tradeoff, often… Full Details | |
| From Typing Without Looking to Communicating With the Eyes |
Khai N Truong Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, University of Toronto |
Text entry is an important form of input regularly performed by computer users. However, there are many situations in which users might not be able to enter text using a physical QWERTY keyboard. One aspect of my research over the past 5 years has focused specifically on how to enable users to… Full Details | |
| Architecting Interactivity: How Experiments in Architecture, Cybernetics & AI Poured the Foundations of Interaction Design |
Molly Steenson Associate Professor, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University |
Inspired by cybernetics and artificial intelligence researchers who modeled intelligence in hardware and software, architects in the 1960s and 70s applied computational practices to interfaces, rooms, buildings, and cities. In so doing, they began to build feedback, cognition and intelligence into… Full Details | |
| Making "Making" Accessible |
Amy Hurst Associate Professor, Information Systems Department, UMBC |
Assistive Technologies empower individuals to accomplish tasks they might not be able to do otherwise. Unfortunately, a large percentage of Assistive Technologies end up unused or abandoned, leaving people with solutions that are inappropriate for their needs. My students and I are working to help… Full Details | |
| How UX Techniques Promote Simulation Software for Everyone | 
Manager of User Experience, ANSYS Inc. |
At ANSYS, we create simulation software that is a key component of the product development process, helping to validate the effectiveness of designs before they are built. Simulation techniques impact all types of products, from automobiles, to circuits, to pipes, to airplanes. ANSYS is working to… Full Details | |
| HCII Postdoctoral Fellow Short Talks 3 |
Zhen Bai, Soniya Gadgil-Sharma, Hernisa Kacorri Post-Doctoral Fellows, HCII, Carnegie Mellon University |
Speaker: Zhen Bai Title: Fostering Curiosity Through Peer Support in Collaborative Science Learning Abstract: Curiosity is a key motivational factor in learning. This is, however, often neglected in many classrooms, especially larger and inner-city classrooms, which have instead… Full Details | |
| Design at Large: Real-World, Large Scale, and Sometimes Disruptive |
Scott Klemmer Associate Professor, Cognitive Science and Computer Science & Engineering, UC San Diego |
Over the past five years, my group—and probably many of you—have experienced a dramatically-increased ability to do Design at Large: creating research that is widely used by real people and learning a ton from the experience. One shift that happens when we move from designing artifacts in the lab… Full Details | |
| Embodied Empathic Agents - Just What Tutoring Systems Need? |
Ruth Aylett Professor of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK |
Embodied empathic agents are characters that, by their actions and behaviours, are able to show empathy (or not) for other characters; and/or characters that, by their appearance, situation, and behaviour, are able to trigger empathic reactions in the user. In this talk we discuss… Full Details | |
| Social Capital as a Concept in Human-Computer Interaction - From Bowling Together to Friendsourcing | 
Associate Professor, University of Michigan School of Information |
Social capital is a construct describing the resources one can draw from social network connections. This talk will describe social capital as a concept, and the ways it has been described, operationalized, and designed in HCI research. Using Paul Resnick’s classic “Bowling Together” article as a… Full Details | |
| Post-Doc Short Talks 2 |
Michael Eagle, Swarup Kumar Sahoo, Ran Liu Postdoctoral Researchers, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University |
Speaker: Michael Eagle Title: Predicting Individual Differences for Learner Modeling in Intelligent Tutors from Previous Learner Activities Abstract: This study examines how accurately individual student differences in learning can be predicted from prior student learning… Full Details | |
| Post-Doc Short Talks 1 |
Sangwon Bae, Joel Chan, Irene-Angelica Chounta Postdoctoral Researchers, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University |
Speaker: Joel Chan Title: Accelerating innovation with computational analogy: Challenges and new solutions Abstract: Ideas from research papers in a different domain can trigger creative breakthroughs. But most papers outside of one’s domain are not useful: the ones that trigger… Full Details | |
| Instrumented and Connected: Designing Next-Generation Learning Experiences |
Tovi Grossman Distinguished Research Scientist, Autodesk |
Today, we are moving faster than ever towards Weiser’s seminal vision of technology being woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. Not only have we adopted mobile, and more recently, wearable technologies, that we depend on almost every hour of our waking lives, there is an internet, and more… Full Details | |
| Collaborative News: From “Narcotweets” to Journalism-as-a-Service |
Andrés Monroy-Hernández Affiliate Professor, University of Washington |
How do people living in the midst of war use social media, and what can we learn from them to design the next generation of news technologies? In this presentation, I start by narrating how residents of cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War use social media to circumvent censorship imposed… Full Details | |
| "Primordial", Ecological Design and the Nature of Things |
Mickey McManus Research Fellow, Office of the CTO, Autodesk |
In his current research project, “Primordial," Mickey McManus and his team are exploring the impact on design when three inevitable technology trends converge. Often called the “Internet of Things,” pervasive computing is a game-changer that's on a collision course with two… Full Details | |
| Special HCI Seminar: Finding Gender-Inclusiveness Software Issues in the Real World with GenderMag |
Margaret Burnett Distinguished Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University |
Gender inclusiveness in computing settings is receiving a lot of attention, but one potentially critical factor has mostly been overlooked: software itself. To help close this gap, we recently created GenderMag, a systematic inspection method to enable software practitioners to evaluate their… Full Details | |
| CANCELLED - HCII Seminar Series: Kellee Santiago | |||
| Confessions of a Design Therapist | 
Owner/Principal, Cox & Hall, LLC |
In this lecture, Norm Cox will explore the early design roots of user interface, interaction and experience design, beginning with Xerox’s Star workstation designed at the famous Palo Alto Research Center. Drawing from his 34 years of consulting in user experience design, he will also share stories… Full Details | |
| Interactive Visual Tools for Mining Large Graphs | 
Assistant Professor, School of Computational Science & Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology |
At the Polo Club of Data Science, we innovate at the intersection of HCI and Data Mining, combining the best from both worlds to synthesize scalable interactive tools for making sense of billion-scale graph data. I will present some of our latest works, including: (1) GLO-STIX, a… Full Details | |
| Leading the Startup UX | 
Principal UX Designer (independent) |
Let's imagine: You've happily graduated from CMU and just joined a startup as the lead (or maybe only!) designer. Nice! But you know you need to make quick impact for credibility and value to the product --and the company! But you’ve inherited a product lacking visual consistency or user-centered… Full Details | |
| The Role of Cognitive Strategy in Human-Computer Interaction |
Anthony Hornof Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon |
A fundamental challenge for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) is to develop, identify and promote engineering approaches that can predict the usability and learnability of a user interface before it is built. Research in computational cognitive modeling aims to develop and… Full Details |