A team at Apple analyzed nearly 78,000 screenshots from more than 4,000 apps to improve the screen reader function on its mobile devices. The result was Screen Recognition, a tool that uses machine learning and computer vision to automatically detect and provide content readable by VoiceOver for apps that would otherwise not be accessible.
Researchers Will Develop Prototype Smartphone Interface for Accessible Self-Driving Cars
A team led by the Human-Computer Interaction Institute is one of 10 semifinalists in the U.S. Department of Transportation's Inclusive Design Challenge, which seeks to make self-driving vehicles more accessible to people with disabilities.
Amelia Li is threading wires into bits of hardware scattered on a table. As she alternates between red, yellow, blue and green, the master's student of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University keeps the fixated attention of a seamstress. The experimental contraption will go into the wheelchair of Jennifer Phillips who sits next to her.
Thousands of the world’s top researchers, scientists, and designers are traveling to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (also known as CHI) this weekend. The premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction will take place in Glasgow, UK from May 4-9, 2019.
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.
