Announcing Liang He, PhD Candidate! Liang He successfully passed his General Exam entitled Interactive Design Tools and Techniques for Augmented 3D Printable Behaviors. His talk and accompanying slides were beautifully designed and thoughtfully captured his vision for enabling designers and DIY makers to more easily prototype and fabricate interactive 3D printable forms. Congrats Liang!  

It's my pleasure to announce that Dhruv Jain passed his General Exam entitled Sound Sensing & Feedback Techniques for d/Deaf & Hard of Hearing Users: A Dissertation Proposal. His dissertation work was thoughtfully presented, well rehearsed, and even included two live demos (of HomeSound and of SoundWatch). Congrats DJ! Thanks also to the wonderful committee, including co-chair Professor Findlater and fellow committee members Professors Mankoff, Ladner, Wobbrock, and Bigham—literally an all-star cast of HCI+accessibility experts. You can download the slides here or watch the whole thing on YouTube! A few screenshots of the talk (all but the presenter + interpreters had video off):  

Announcing Dr. Seokbin Kang—Seokbin successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled Augmented Reality Systems and USer Interaction Techniques for STEM Learning." Seokbin is my last UMD CS advisee and it was an enormous honor working with him. Thanks also to the amazing commitee, which included Professors David Jacobs, Tamara Clegg, Huaishu Peng, and David Weintrop.  

Members of the newly launched UW CREATE accessibility center won all three top awards at ASSETS2020—the top publication venue in accessibility research—including Best Artifact for our SoundWatch work, Best Paper awarded to Professor Leah Findlater and her PhD student Lotus Zhang, Best Student Paper awarded to PhD student Megan Hofmann and colleagues (including her advisor and CREATE co-director Jennifer Mankoff). Congrats all! Relatedly, Sarah McQuate wrote a lovely article on our SoundWatch work—check it out!    

It's my pleasure to announce that Dhruv Jain passed his General Exam entitled Sound Sensing & Feedback Techniques for d/Deaf & Hard of Hearing Users: A Dissertation Proposal. His dissertation work was thoughtfully presented, well rehearsed, and even included two live demos (of HomeSound and of SoundWatch). Congrats DJ!

Thanks also to the wonderful committee, including co-chair Professor Findlater and fellow committee members Professors Mankoff, Ladner, Wobbrock, and Bigham—literally an all-star cast of HCI+accessibility experts.

You can download the slides here or watch the whole thing on YouTube!

A few screenshots of the talk (all but the presenter + interpreters had video off):

 

The Makeability Lab had four papers accepted to CHI this year. The acceptance rate was 24% (760 accepts of 3126 submissions). Congrats to the lead PhD students: Steven Goodman (HCDE), Dhruv Jain (CSE), Seokbin Kang (CS), Wendy Roldan (HCDE), and all our wonderful collaborators.

• Goodman, S., Kirchner, S., Guttman, R., Jain, D., Froehlich, J., Findlater, L. Evaluating Smartwatch-based Sound Feedback for Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Users Across Contexts, CHI2020
• Jain D., Mack., K., Amrous, A., Wright, M., Goodman, S., Findlater, L., Froehlich, J. HomeSound: An Iterative Field Deployment of an In-Home Sound Awareness System for Deaf or Hard of Hearing Users, CHI2020
• Kang, S., Shokeen, E., Byrne, V., Norooz, L., Bonsignore, E., Williams-Pierce, C., Froehlich, J. ARMath: Augmenting Everyday Life with Math Learning, CHI2020
• Roldan, W., Gao, X., Marie, A., Hishikawa, T, Li, Z., Zhang, E., Froehlich, J., Yip, J. Opportunities and Challenges in Involving Users in Project-Based HCI Education, CHI2020

We plan to post the camera-ready versions of the papers and some videos in January!

The Makeability Lab and the UbiComp Lab hosted students from Northwest High School. The high school students were all taking an Internet of Things (IoT course), which focuses not just on building IoT technology but the societal implications. For example, students are asked to consider: How can this technology help us achieve a more just and equitable world? How will we be able to ensure that these devices improve our quality of life without imprisoning us? What ethics or code of conduct should guide the IoT?

Venkatesh spoke about his research supporting blind programmers, Manaswi spoke about Project Sidewalk and urban accessibility visualizations, and Dhruv spoke about his work on sound awareness tools for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.