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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
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 … 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.… 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… Full Details

Achieving Real Virtuality: Closing the Gap Between the Digital and the Physical
Daniel Wigdor

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… Full Details

In A Flash: Crowdsourcing Organizations, Collaborations, and Research Michael Bernstein
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… 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… Full Details

Instrumented and Connected: Designing Next-Generation Learning Experiences
Tovi Grossman

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… Full Details

Unlocking Data, Unlocking Interaction James Fogarty
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,… 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… 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… 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… Full Details

How UX Techniques Promote Simulation Software for Everyone Imran Riaz with guest Jared Pryor
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… 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… 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… 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… Full Details

Social Capital as a Concept in Human-Computer Interaction - From Bowling Together to Friendsourcing Cliff Lampe
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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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 Norm Cox
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… Full Details

Interactive Visual Tools for Mining Large Graphs Polo Chau
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-… Full Details

Leading the Startup UX Uday Gajendar
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-… 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

Test Seminar James Bond
Her Majesty's Secret Agent

Think you have what it takes to become James Bond? This seminar will explain the process in which Her Majesty recruits James Bonde wannabes. Hail Britannia! We don't compare ourselves with other 3 letter agencies.