Makeability Lab member Manaswi Saha was an invited keynote speaker to the Washingtion State Ridesharing Organization (WSRO) conference. She gave a talk on Project Sidewalk entitled Project Sidewalk: Mapping the accessibility of the physical world at scale using interactive computational tools. Congrats Manaswi and thanks for representing the Project Sidewalk team.

With the recent Seattle and Newberg launch of Project Sidewalk, we have been getting a lot of media attention. Here are a few articles so far (many more to come!): Newberg streets second in nation to be studied with new accessibility metric (The Newberg Graphic, April 2019) Seattle's got terrible sidewalks. You can help fix them. (Crosscut, April 2019)

Project Sidewalk was covered by a DC TV station, WUSA9. Check out the video coverage and the news report now! This is exciting!

We were honored to participate in the inaugural Diversity in Computing Summit. Makeability Lab and Inclusive Design Lab members presented a joint session on their accessibility research. The session, entitled "Interactive Computational Tools for Accessibility," covered work on Project Sidewalk (by Manaswi Saha), Temporal Tracking of Accessibility Features in Cities (by Ladan Najafizadeh) , Health and Fitness for the Mobility Impaired (by Meethu Malu), Accessible On-body Interaction for the Visually Impaired (by Uran Oh) and HandSight (by Lee Stearns). Talk slides are available here.

Daniel presents the recent work of the Makeability Lab at the Ability/LEAP Accessibility Research Night. Congrats to the successful talk! Here's a copy of the presentation.

At the 2022 PacTrans Region 10 Transportation Conference, Professor Froehlich received the PacTrans Outstanding Researcher Award for "outstanding research with significant outcomes, incorporating meaningful student contributions, and robust community service/leadership involvement."

Professor Froehlich said "this is really a collective award recognizing the work of PhD students Manaswi Saha, Chu Li, research scientist Michael Saugstad, and our collaborators and partners across the world, including UIC's Institute on Disability and Human Development, WorldEnabled.org, Liga Peatonal, and Gemeente Amsterdam."

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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.