Like many other conferences this year, the 2020 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) was held virtually in July. The theme for the online event was "More than Human-Centered Design."
How can students learn to make their civil discourse more productive? One Carnegie Mellon University researcher proposes an AI-powered video game. The educational system targeted toward high schoolers adapts to students' specific values and can be used to measure — and in some cases reduce — the impact of bias.
Professor Jason Hong was awarded a 2019 Amazon Research Award in support of the project "Designing Alternative Representations of Confusion Matrices to Evaluate Public Perceptions of Fairness in Machine Learning."
Hong is the first from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute to receive the Amazon Research Award, which is now in its fifth year.
"Some people in Pittsburgh are seeing voices."
That's how AT&T Bell Laboratories advertised its first commercial Picturephone in 1970. The print ad goes on to say that while it would be a lot of work to build a new type of communication network, "Picturephone service is a reality in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," and will soon be available in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
Wuyang Wang knew she got lucky last year. Then a student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute's (HCII) Master of Human-Computer Interaction program (MHCI), she was assigned to a capstone project team for Zazzle, a platform that brings people together to design, make, sell, purchase or even share products online.
Contact-tracing could help curb the spread of COVID-19. While the process can be performed manually, researchers have suggested that digital contact tracing using cell phones could be a more accurate and scalable approach. But its effectiveness relies heavily on a large installation rate — and that may depend on how people weigh the app's utility versus its privacy risks.
Faced with a common peril, people delay making decisions that might save lives, fail to alert each other to danger and spread misinformation. Those may sound like behaviors associated with the current pandemic, but they actually surfaced in experiments on how social networks function in emergencies.
As stay-at-home orders swept across the country during the Covid-19 pandemic, our researchers answered the call to help others.
When the campus announced it would close, they packed up and relocated the 3D printers. They applied for grants. They adjusted ongoing research projects and they even started new ones -- all from their homes.
A "smart" polymer cast that automatically seals itself around a broken arm, a membrane that can sense where it has been cut, and pneumatic actuators that can be cut and reconfigured into different shapes are some possible applications for a new self-healing material developed at Carnegie Mellon University.
