It was a pleasure to meet Professor Youngki Lee and his students during their visit to our lab. We discussed our work in augmented reality and computer vision as well as their new approaches to edge computing and ML. Thank you for the visit!

The Project Sidewalk team led a session at the 2023 PacTrans-WSDOT Summer High School Transportation Camp talking about urban design, human mobility, and disability. Students also participated in interactive activities related to sidewalk accessibility and discussed their own experiences with inaccessible transit and urban design.

We had a fun visit from Josh Myers-Dean, a PhD student from the University of Colorado Boulder interested in computer vision and accessibility. Thank you Josh for visiting!  

It was so wonderful to finally meet our collaborator and Utah State University Professor Brent Chamberlain. Thank you Brent for stopping by with your family to Seattle. Such a joy to meet you and soak up some of your infectious energy and positivity. Professor Chamberlain is PI on our NSF Convergence grant and seemingly has infinite overlapping personal and professional interests with me! The picture below is from my "famous" green screen in my home teaching studio that shows up often in my Zoom calls (or does it?!).

The Project Sidewalk team led a session at the 2023 PacTrans-WSDOT Summer High School Transportation Camp talking about urban design, human mobility, and disability. Students also participated in interactive activities related to sidewalk accessibility and discussed their own experiences with inaccessible transit and urban design.

It was so wonderful to finally meet our collaborator and Utah State University Professor Brent Chamberlain. Thank you Brent for stopping by with your family to Seattle. Such a joy to meet you and soak up some of your infectious energy and positivity.

Professor Chamberlain is PI on our NSF Convergence grant and seemingly has infinite overlapping personal and professional interests with me!

The picture below is from my "famous" green screen in my home teaching studio that shows up often in my Zoom calls (or does it?!).

Project Sidewalk collaborator Kie Fujii—who recently graduated from Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in New Jersey—presented our work on Project Sidewalk in Oradell, NJ at the 2023 Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers in Aurora, Colorado.

In Kie's words:

 The poster presentation was a huge hit! Several people were excited to learn about this project and wanted to implement this work in their towns. 

Thanks to Kie for presenting on our team's behalf and congrats and best wishes to her as she starts as a medical resident at UC San Diego.

We were honored and excited to take part in UW's Accessible Technology Research Showcase co-hosted by UW CREATE and HuskyADAPT. It was a truly wonderful and inspiring event—with a scale and scope rivaling many conference poster/demo sessions (and this was all UW work!).

Lab members Daniel Campos Zamora, Chu Li, and Katrina Ma all presented work. Congrats team!

Congratulations to Dhruv Jain who was selected for the prestigious Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant for his work on “Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users.” The MSR Dissertationg Grant aims to "increase the pipeline of diverse talent receiving advanced degrees in computing-related fields by providing a research funding opportunity for doctoral students who are underrepresented in the field of computing."

Read more on the Allen School news page.

Congratulations to Dhruv Jain who was selected for the Google-CMD-IT LEAP Alliance Fellowship. CMD-IT stands for the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT and is dedicated to "promoting innovation that enriches, enhances, and enables our target communities, such that more equitable and sustainable contributions are possible by all communities."

Dhruv Jain's Deaf Travel Autoethnography was covered by the UW Daily. Read the article here.

We were honored that both of our papers submitted to ASSETS'19 were accepted for publication:

• Autoethnography of a Hard of Hearing Traveler led by UW CSE PhD student, Dhruv Jain, and co-authored by Jain, Audrey Desjardins (School of Art + Art History + Design), Leah Findlater (HCDE), and Jon Froehlich
• Deep Learning for Automatically Detecting Sidewalk Accessibility Problems Using Streetscape Imagery led by UW CSE PhD students, Galen Weld and Esther Jang, and co-authored by Weld, Jang, Anthony Li (UMD ugrad), Aileen Zeng (UW CSE ugrad), Kurtis Heimerl (UW CSE prof), and Jon Froehlich.

Congratulations to Maryam Hosseini on their successful PhD defense on semi-automatic sidewalk assessments. Wonderful work. Terrific presentation. Beautiful slides.

Our work together played but a small role in this incredibly impactful research:

Hosseini, M., Saugstad, M., Miranda, F., Sevtsuk, A., Silva, C. T., Froehlich, J. E. (2022). Towards Global-Scale Crowd+AI Techniques to Map and Assess Sidewalks for People with Disabilities. CVPR2020 Workshop: Accessibility, Vision, and Autonomy (AVA). DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.13677

Congratulations Maryam!

Together with Professor Fabior Miranda from the University of Illinois, Chicago and Maryam Hosseini from Rutgers/NYU, we ran a mini-symposium session on the The Future of Global-Scale Spatial Data Collection and Analyses on Urban (in)Accessibility for People with Disabilities at the 2nd Spatial Data Science Symposium 2021.

In our session, we brought together experts in disability, human mobility, urban planning, and computer science to discuss state-of-the-art methods for measuring the quality, condition, and accessibility of urban infrastructure, how these methods may enable new types of geospatial analysis and visualization, and the possibilities for data-driven policy change and accessible urban development. Our overarching goal was to identify open challenges, share current work across disciplines, and spur new collaborations.

We had over 50 participants join and a set of lightning talks from Anat Caspi and Nick Bolten from UW, Roberto M. Cesar Jr. and Eric K. Tokuda, from the University of São Paulo, Holger Dieterich and Sebastian Felix Zappe from Sozialhelden, Victor Pineda from the Inclusive Cities Lab and Worldenabled.org, Yochai Eisenberg from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Andres Sevtsuk from UW.

Froehlich, J. E., Miranda, F., Hosseini, M., Bolten, N., Caspi, A., Cesar Jr., R. M., Dieterich, H., Eisenberg, Y., Pineda, V., Saha, M., Saugstad, M., Sevtsuk, A., Silva, C. T., Tokuda, E. K., Zappe, S. F. (2021). The Future of Global-Scale Spatial Data Collection and Analyses on Urban (in)Accessibility for People with Disabilities. Spatial Data Science Symposium 2021.

Manaswi Saha gave an invited Google Tech Talk on Project Sidewalk and interactive accessibility geo-visualizations. The talk slides are here.

Our ASSETS'19 paper "Deep Learning for Automatically Detecting Sidewalk Accessibility Problems Using Streetscape Imagery" was just recognized with the 'Best Student Paper Award'--given to only one of the 158 submissions

Congrats team!