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.

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!

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.

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!).    

While a PhD student in the Makeability Lab, Lee Stearns interned at Microsoft Research, Cambridge in the UK and worked on an early version of Project Tokyo, which was just announced publicly. According to Microsoft, "Project Tokyo aims to understand how to create a visual agent technology that is useful and usable in the real world by focusing on how AI technology can help to augment people’s own capabilities." Read the full news article here. Congrats Lee!

Lee graduated with his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park in Dec 2018 (news link) and is now at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Picture from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-tokyo/.

 

Please join me in congratulating Drs. Matt Mauriello and Lee Stearns who successfully passed their PhD defenses today. One of the true joys of being a professor is seeing students develop into independent scholars like Matt and Lee. Matt is now off to a post-doc at Stanford and Lee will join APL at Johns Hopkins.

Thanks to the fantastic committee members as well who spanned from multiple disciplines, universities, and parts of the US! :)

Matt's dissertation is entitled " Designing and Evaluating Next-generation Thermographic Systems to Support Residential Energy Audits" and available for download here and Lee's dissertation is entitled "Handsight: A Touch-based Wearable System to Increase Information Accessibility for People With Visual Impairments" and available here.

We’re going to Galway, Ireland! The Makeability Lab has two full papers and three posters at ASSETS’18.

UMD PhD student Lee Stearns led a project entitled Design of an Augmented Reality Magnification Aid for Low Vision Users and explores augmented reality solutions for magnifying text for low-vision users. Lee also had a poster paper accepted entitled Applying Transfer Learning to Recognize Clothing Patterns Using a Finger-Mounted Camera. Both projects are in collaboration with UW HCDE professor Leah Findlater.

UW CSE PhD student Dhruv Jain led a project entitled Towards Accessible Conversations in a Mobile Context for People Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing and examines real-time captioning solutions for people who are DHH and on-the-move. This work is a collaboration among UW CSE (Dhruv Jain, Jon Froehlich), UW HCDE (Rachel Franz, Leah Findlater) and Gallaudet University in DC (Raja Kushalnagar).

The Project Sidewalk team also got two posters in: A Feasibility Study of Using Google Street View and Computer Vision to Track the Evolution of Urban Accessibility , which was based on Ladan Najafizdeh's MS thesis work and Interactively Modeling and Visualizing Neighborhood Accessibility at Scale: An Initial Study of Washington DC , which was led by undergrad extraordinaire Anthony Li along with Manaswi Saha).

Lee Stearns and the HandSight project were featured in the Big Ten Network's news site, in an article titled "How Maryland researchers are improving reading for the visually impaired: BTN LiveBIG".