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!    

Both of our ASSETS'19 papers were nominated for 'Best Paper' at ASSETS'19:

1. Weld, G., Jang, E., Li, A., Zeng, A., Heimerl, K., Froehlich, J. E. (2019). Deep Learning for Automatically Detecting Sidewalk Accessibility Problems Using Streetscape Imagery. Proceedings of ASSETS 2019.
2. Jain, D., Desjardins, A., Findlater, L., Froehlich, J. E. (2019). Autoethnography of a Hard of Hearing Traveler. Proceedings of ASSETS 2019.

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.