I am pleased to announce that Kotaro Hara passed his PhD defense this afternoon on "Scalable Methods to Collect and Visualize Sidewalk Accessibility Data for People with Mobility Impairments." It was a true pleasure advising Kotaro, my first PhD student. I will miss his generous spirit, creativity, and his passion for research with a social impact. This fall, Kotaro joins CMU as a post-doc with Jeff Bigham and Aaron Steinfeld.
Recent News from Jon
May 20, 2023 | Jon
The Makeability Lab took part in the Drumheller Half Marathon—a wonderful new(ish) tradition hosted by the Allen School's own Race Condition Running Club. CSE ugrads, grads, postdocs, faculty, and staff participated. It was so much fun! The course begins with a short segment down the upper vista, followed by 110 laps around Drumheller Fountain. Runners will enter first loop from the east of the finish line and begin by running counterclockwise. The direction will flip every 20 minutes, and runners must change directions only by rounding the marker placed at the north end of the finish line. Here's a few pictures and my GPS log from the run.
May 12, 2023 | Jon
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!
Mar 04, 2023 | Jon
Congrats to Chu Li for presenting our work on Project Sidewalk and sidewalk equity for the World Information Architecture Day in Seattle. Pictures below courtesy of Zhihan Zhang.
Mar 02, 2023 | Jon
Congrats to Stefania Druga for passing her iSchool PhD dissertation defense today on the topic of Creative AI Literacies for Families. I was honored to serve on the PhD committee. Such timely, important work exploring how to develop children and family AI literacy and involve them in AI-assisted creation! Also, best title slide ever, which was generated via DALL E-2 using the new Microsoft Designer—an AI-assisted design tool (how fitting!).
Recent News from Project Sidewalk
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.
May 12, 2023 | Jon
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!
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Jan 11, 2023 | Jon
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.
Dec 16, 2022 | Jon
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.
