Recent News

Kotaro Hara gave an invited presentation about the Project Sidewalk at GroupSight workshop, held in Austin Texas during the HCOMP conference this year. In the presentation, Kotaro introduced our work on locating sidewalk accessibility features by combining crowdsourcing, computer vision, machine learning, and Google Street View.

Our project got featured on Technica.ly after giving a presentation at Transportation Tech in Baltimore. See the article here: How this UMD researcher is using Google Street View to make the physical world more accessible.

Projects

Project Sidewalk

2012 – Present

Publications

Project Sidewalk: A Web-based Crowdsourcing Tool for Collecting Sidewalk Accessibility Data at Scale

Manaswi Saha, Mikey Saugstad, Teja Maddali, Aileen Zeng, Ryan Holland, Steven Bower, Aditya Dash, Sage Chen, Anthony Li, Kotaro Hara, Jon E. Froehlich

Proceedings of CHI 2019 | Acceptance Rate: 23.8% (705 / 2960) | Best Paper Award

Grand challenges in accessible maps

Jon E. Froehlich, Anke Brock, Anat Caspi, Joao Guerreiro, Kotaro Hara, Reuben Kirkham, Johannes Schoning, Benjamin Tannert

Interactions

A Pilot Deployment of an Online Tool for Large-Scale Virtual Auditing of Urban Accessibility

Manaswi Saha, Kotaro Hara, Soheil Behnezhad, Anthony Li, Mikey Saugstad, Teja Maddali, Sage Chen, Jon E. Froehlich

Extended Abstract Proceedings of ASSETS 2017

Scalable Methods to Collect and Visualize Sidewalk Accessibility Data for People with Mobility Impairments

Kotaro Hara

UMD CS PhD Dissertation

The Design of Assistive Location-based Technologies for People with Ambulatory Disabilities: A Formative Study

Kotaro Hara, Christine Chan, Jon E. Froehlich

Proceedings of CHI 2016 | Acceptance Rate: 25.0% (600 / 2400)

Characterizing and Visualizing Physical World Accessibility at Scale Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning

Kotaro Hara, Jon E. Froehlich

SIGACCESS Newsletter '15

Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View: An Extended Analysis

Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia Bennett, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle Ng, Jon E. Froehlich

TACCESS 2015

Scalable methods to collect and visualize sidewalk accessibility data for people with mobility impairments

Kotaro Hara

Extended Abstract Proceedings of UIST 2014

Tohme: Detecting Curb Ramps in Google Street View Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning

Kotaro Hara, Jin Sun, Robert Moore, David Jacobs, Jon E. Froehlich

Proceedings of UIST 2014

An Initial Study of Automatic Curb Ramp Detection with Crowdsourced Verification using Google Street View Images

Kotaro Hara, Jin Sun, Noa Chazan, David Jacobs, Jon E. Froehlich

Poster Proceedings of HCOMP 2013

Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View

Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia Bennett, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle Ng, Jon E. Froehlich

Proceedings of ASSETS 2013 | Best Paper Award

Exploring Early Solutions for Automatically Identifying Inaccessible Sidewalks in the Physical World using Google Street View

Kotaro Hara, Victoria Le, Jin Sun, David Jacobs, Jon E. Froehlich

HCIC2013 Workshop

Combining Crowdsourcing and Google Street View to Identify Street-level Accessibility Problems

Kotaro Hara, Victoria Le, Jon E. Froehlich

Proceedings of CHI 2013

A feasibility study of crowdsourcing and google street view to determine sidewalk accessibility

Kotaro Hara, Victoria Le, Jon E. Froehlich

Poster Proceedings of ASSETS 2012