Selected from more than one thousand proposals, four faculty members from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute have received 2017 Google Faculty Research Awards. Google hopes these collaborative relationships with world-class computer science faculty researchers will impact how future generations use technology, benefiting both the researchers and Google.
“It’s like all of March Madness in one weekend,” said Patrick Carrington, postdoctoral research fellow at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, of the National Wheelchair Basketball Tournament (NWBT) in Louisville, Kentucky.
3D printing has been quietly moving towards a radical revolution over the past several years. While it has already exceeded 5.1 billion, its growth has been relatively slow, and not as disruptive as some might have envisioned. Instead, 3D printing has been advancing to its quiet revolution through applications like medical technology and industrial manufacturing.
HCII Professor Chris Harrison and PhD students Gierad Laput and Yang Zhang have unveiled Synthetic Sensors, a sensing abstraction project that allows everyday environments to become smart environments, without the use of cameras. The project originated from Zensors, which used a camera-based sensing approach and crowd sourcing to detect environmental states and changes.
In any given day, how many actions or activities do you complete without pausing to think? Whether it's remembering each step to make a cup of coffee or remembering each turn on your daily commute, successfully navigating our daily routines is an accomplishment we often don't think twice about. That is, until these steps become harder to remember.
The Human-Computer Interaction Institute's research project, Helping Hands, made an appearance in a recent Health Tech Insiders article. This project, led by HCII professors Scott Hudson and Jen Mankoff, uses 3D printing to fabricate custom limb prosthetics for children born with upper limb reductions. By leveraging 3D printing technologies, HCII researchers are able to fit children with custom prosthetic in a more financially affordable than the traditional prosthetic methods.
HCII postdoctoral fellow Luz Rello received the 2016 New Researcher Award during the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) Conference, held in Orlando, Fla., October 26-29, 2016. The four day conference is an annual event that reviews the latest research to educators, administrators, specialist, researchers and more in efforts to advance professional development in reading, literacy and learning.
Meet Chinmay Kulkarni, who joined the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) faculty last year. Kulkarni shares his background, research motivation and what students can expect from his classes.
What was your background before joining the HCII?
We have built an emotion recognition system based on prosodic features (i.e. intensity, pitch, formant frequencies of sounds) combined with short-term perceptual features for classifying the following emotions: anger, fear, happy, sad, surprise, and neutral. Additional emotional states can be included. Prosodic information applies to syllables, words, or phrases. An interactive dialog elicits responses from the user.
VRAs are applications of wearable devices which track patient home exercises in order to quantify exercise metrics regarding compliance, performance, and symptom levels. VRAs are designed to provide Physical Therapists (PTs) with precise, quantitative data regarding patients' home exercises. This precise information can then be used by PTs to improve their decision making regarding treatment adjustments.
