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
April 8, 2015 4:00pm	Enabling Creativity Through Better Tools for Designers and Developers	Joel Brandt Senior Research Scientist and Engineering Manager, Adobe Research
April 1, 2015 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Nicole Kramer
March 25, 2015 4:00pm	Exploring the Universe with Immersive Virtual Reality	Scott Davidoff Human Interfaces Manager, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab
March 18, 2015 4:00pm	Behavioral Science at Disney Research	Maarten Bos Research Scientist, Disney Research
March 4, 2015 4:30pm	Your Brain on Typography	Ellen Lupton Senior Curator, Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
February 27, 2015 1:30pm	Tasty Technology: Creating Multisensory Experiences	Marianna Obrist Lecturer in Interaction Design, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
February 25, 2015 4:00pm	Going Beyond Code Search	Steven Reiss Professor, Computer Science Department, Brown University
February 18, 2015 4:00pm	Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as Components of Rich Landscapes of Learning	Gerhard Fischer Adjunct Professor and Professor Emeritus, Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder
February 11, 2015 4:00pm	The Continuing Quest for Secure and Usable Passwords	Lorrie Cranor Professor, Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
February 4, 2015 4:00pm	Humanizing the Enterprise: Delivering Best in Class Experience to Business Software Users	Janaki Kumar Head of Strategic Design Services, Design & Co-Innovation Center, SAP Labs
January 28, 2015 4:00pm	Toward Gender-Inclusive Software: A Tale of Five Facets	Margaret Burnett Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University
January 21, 2015 4:00pm	Walgreens Customer Experience: From "At" to "Through"	Pete Wendel UX Manager, Walgreens
January 14, 2015 4:00pm	Robots as ‘Companion Species’? Designing for Disability and the Mixed Spaces of Human-Robot Interactions	Mark Paterson Visiting Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh
December 3, 2014 4:00pm	Socio-technical Systems Under Stress	Brian Keegan Computational Social Scientist and Research Associate, Harvard Business School‘s HBX	Socio-technical Systems Under Stress Socio-technical systems can face intense stresses arising from unusual patterns of human social behavior. Misinformation can propagate rapidly through social networks like Twitter despite the availability of fact-checking websites. Wikipedia's encyclopedia… Full Details
November 19, 2014 4:00pm	Motivational Environments: Strategies for Personalized Learning, Intelligent Creativity Support,and Open Health Innovation	Winslow Burleson Associate Professor, College of Nursing and Computer Science Department, New York University	Motivational Environments:Strategies for Personalized Learning, Intelligent Creativity Support,and Open Health Innovation Advances in wearable and ambient sensors, responsive spaces, robots and relational agents present transformative opportunities to develop context and affect aware systems for… Full Details
November 5, 2014 4:00pm	Expanding Games	Robin Hunicke Co-Founder, Funomena	Games, now more than ever, are expanding. Reaching new audiences via new devices and technologies, exploring deeper subjects via evolving modes of interactivity, and empowering bright new voices from all over the world. In this talk I will cover my history as a researcher, maker and evangelist… Full Details
October 29, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Jon Froehlich	Jon Froehlich Assistant Professor, Computer Science, University of Maryland College Park	"Characterizing Physical World Accessibility at Scale Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning" Roughly 30.6 million individuals in the US have physical disabilities that affect their ambulatory activities; nearly half of those individuals report using an assistive aid such as a… Full Details
October 22, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Yao Cheng
October 15, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Laurel Riek	Laurel Riek Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame
October 8, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson	Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson Associate Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents, Reykjavik University
October 1, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Speaker: Leanne Bowler	Leanne Bowler Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh	"Friendship, joy, cruelty, confusion…and sometimes, reflection and wisdom: Young peoples’ interactions with information and communications technologies" Digital forms of information are increasingly ubiquitous, unbound to a physical space and embedded within all manner of “smart” objects. From… Full Details
September 29, 2014 4:00pm	Dream Worlds: Imagining the Worlds of Walden and The Night Journey	Tracy Fullerton Associate Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts Chair, Univrsity of Southern California	In this presentation, Tracy will discuss the evolution of the designs for two experimental game worlds: The Night Journey and Walden, a game. The Night Journey is a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola which game takes place in a visually abstracted landscape… Full Details
September 24, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Carl DiSalvo	Carl DiSalvo Associate Professor; School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Georgia Institue of Technology	Design Experiments in Speculative Civics Design is increasingly involved in our public lives, giving form to issues and working to enable new modes of participation. Usually this takes an instrumental approach in which the goal is to use design to provide solutions to pressing or perceived matters… Full Details
September 17, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Neil Alexander co-sponsored by QoLT	Neil Alexander Co-Founder, LiveLikeLou.org	Making the Choice to “Live Like Lou” In this inspiring presentation, Neil Alexander uses his personal experience of being diagnosed with ALS, the fatal disease commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease, to emphasize the real-life benefits that gratitude can provide. Using Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest… Full Details
September 10, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Chad Jones	Chad Jones	"Transforming Human Interaction with our World Through the Internet of Things" The next paradigm shift in the Internet will be ability to address, sense and control literally anything in the physical world. Described as The Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Everything (IoE) and the… Full Details
August 27, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar Series: Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck	Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan	"Supporting Parents Online" Almost 30 years after Howard Rheingold’s 1986 account of parenting support he received on the WELL, parents have now become one of the most active demographics of social media users. Though there has been extensive interest in digital youth, little research has focused… Full Details
May 7, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar: A New Era of IBM Design	Phil Gilbert General Manager, IBM Design	Great brands are known, in part, for the design of their products and for understanding how design can fuel client loyalty and longstanding relationships. Think about what makes you choose a product: it's not just about what it does, it's about the experience you have when using it; that is what… Full Details
April 23, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar: Baking Data Into Design: User Experience at Google	Laura Granka Head of UX Research, Google+	The User Experience discipline has made great strides in recent years, especially towards tablet and mobile experiences. Understanding mobile device use is… Full Details
April 16, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar - Ryan Brotman
April 9, 2014 4:00pm	HCII Seminar - Eytan Adar