Our research group (the Makeability Lab in the HCIL) is investigating new, scalable methods and tools for thermographic data collection and analysis. We are looking for talented, creative, and self-motivated undergraduate research assistants with strong technical backgrounds and an interest in environmental sustainability to work on a new, easily deployable thermographic sensor. We are specifically looking for student volunteers interested in developing valuable hardware and software skills over the course of the academic year while supporting an ongoing research project. Interested students should have one or more of the following skills and a keen interest in expanding their abilities in some of the other areas: Experience working with single-board computers and accessories Experience designing front-end and back-end web components Experience prototyping applications with Android devices Eagerness to learn and make with rapid prototyping technologies You will be working in the HCIL Hackerspace, will attend weekly research meetings, and will join a team of other talented undergraduate and graduate students. Our short term goal is a publication at CHI2017 and a potential submission to UIST2017. For best consideration, please read this page about undergraduate research and then send your CV and unofficial transcripts to mattm401@umd.edu and CC jonf@cs.umd.edu by September 21st. We will contact a subset of qualified candidates to setup interviews and request other materials. Full details are available on our announcement webpage. Please feel free to forward this announcement.

On May 14th, 2023, Xia Su visited the User Interface Research Group at University of Tokyo. He introduced the Makeability Lab, as well as Project Sidewalk and RASSAR, to Professor Takeo Igarashi and the lab members of the User Interface Research Group. 

We had a wonderful time this week doing a "lab exchange" with MIT's City Form Lab. On Wednesday, Chu Li and Jon Froehlich gave a talk to the MIT group and on Friday, the MIT group reciprocated and gave a talk to us. Inspirational and fun!

We were honored and delighted to give a talk on SciStarter in honor of MLK Jr.'s Day of Service. You can view the slides here.

In the words of Dr. King:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

These words still resonate today as we continue to attempt to address systemic inequities in human mobility and transit access—for which Project Sidewalk is but one small movement forward.

SciStarter is a platform for community science featuring over 1,000 research projects, including Project Sidewalk. If you join SciStarter, you can get credit for using Project Sidewalk—just make sure you're using the same email addresses on both platforms.

Huge news: Michael Duan was selected as a Finalist for the extremely competitive CRA Undergraduate Research Award based on his work on Scaling Crowd+AI Sidewalk Accessibility Assessments and Sidewalk Gallery.

This is the first time in the Makeability Lab's history that one of our ugrads earned such a distinction. Congratulations Michael on this well-deserved recognition. The Allen School should be producing a story about this soon.

See the full list of awardees here.

Congratulations to Majeed Kazemitabaar who successfully defended his MS thesis entitled "MakerWear: A Tangible Construction Kit for Young Children to Create Interactive Wearables" on Aug 4, 2017 and just submitted the final thesis today. Woohoo! Majeed now plans to return to Iran and work at a startup. We wish him all the best!

We were just notified that MakerWear received the Best Paper award at CHI2017 (top 1% of all submissions at CHI). The conference received over 2400 submissions and 24 were chosen for Best paper (97 were chosen for Honorable Mention). Congrats to lead student Majeed Kazemitibaar and the whole MakerWear team!

This is the first full research publication from Froehlich's NSF CAREER award.

I'm excited to announce that our group just received an NSF CAREER Award to develop and study new interfaces, techniques, and tools to enable young children (ages 5-10) to program, build, and use their own interactive wearables. I've been working on this project since about the time I arrived at UMD, and I'm so happy that it is now funded. Lab member (and MS student) Majeed Kazemitabaar has been absolutely critical in the past few years to making this project what it is today. Our first paper on this work will be published at CHI2017. Hope to see you there!

See also this UMIACS news release.

Majeed Kazemitabaar will be a visiting student researcher this semester at UC Berkeley's Institute of Design (BiD Lab) to work with Prof. Bjoern Hartmann. He will be researching on tangible machine learning for children as part of his ongoing work with MakerWear.

The Baltimore Sun recently covered our BodyVis project with quotes from Professor Clegg and graduate student Virginia Byrne. Read the article here!

Sparkfun Education recently blogged about our BodyVis project in a post entitled "Five E-Textile Research Projects Making a Difference in Education."

We are excited to announce that our research video BodyVis: Advancing New Science Learning and Inquiry Experiences received special recognition as Facilitator’s Choice in 2016 NSF Video Showcase : Advancing Stem for All. The event was held online May 17-23, 2016 to showcase cutting-edge NSF work related to improving teaching and learning. Over 23,500 visitors from 144 countries participated in this event to discuss their work, offer ideas to others, and disseminate innovative ideas