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.

Transportation Techies DC had hosted their second WalkHackNight in Crystal City. Project Sidewalk team was honored to be invited to give a talk at this event. It is the second time for Project Sidewalk to be presenting at this event.

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.

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.

Huge congrats on Chu's successful presentation of Project Sidewalk at Intelligent Transportation Systems Washington 2022! A huge step for Project Sidewalk to go beyond the HCI community!

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.

Congratulations to Manaswi Saha for successfully passing her General Exam on "Designing Interactive Computational Tools for Understanding Urban Accessibility at Scale." Thanks to committee members Bill Howe, Jeff Heer, Bo Zhao, and Anat Caspi.

More pictures here.

We are incredibly excited and proud of PhD student Manaswi Saha, who was just honored with the 2020 Google PhD Fellowship for her work on Project Sidewalk and urban accessibility. Congrats Manaswi on this well-deserved recognition for your important work.

An excerpt of the official blurb from the Allen School News website:

Saha, who is one of 53 students throughout the world to be selected for a Google Fellowship, will use those tools to fill an informational gap between citizens and the local government and stakeholders showing where improvements in sidewalks need to be made to make them accessible to all. 

“Since the beginning of my academic career, my research interests have been towards socially impactful projects. Public service, especially for underrepresented communities, runs in my family,” Saha said. “The driving force for the work I do stems from my role model, my father, who dedicated his life towards rural and agricultural development in India. His selfless efforts inspired me to explore how technology can be used for the betterment of society. With this goal in mind, I set out to do my Ph.D. with a focus on high-value social problems.”

Saha works with Froehlich in the Makeability Lab on one of its flagship ventures, Project Sidewalk. The project has two goals: to develop and study data collection methods for acquiring street-level accessibility information using crowdsourcing, machine learning, and online map imagery and to design and develop navigation and map tools for accessibility.

Manaswi Saha gave an invited Google Tech Talk on Project Sidewalk and interactive accessibility geo-visualizations. The talk slides are here.

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.

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.

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."

//end

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.

We are incredibly excited and proud of PhD student Manaswi Saha, who was just honored with the 2020 Google PhD Fellowship for her work on Project Sidewalk and urban accessibility. Congrats Manaswi on this well-deserved recognition for your important work.

An excerpt of the official blurb from the Allen School News website:

Saha, who is one of 53 students throughout the world to be selected for a Google Fellowship, will use those tools to fill an informational gap between citizens and the local government and stakeholders showing where improvements in sidewalks need to be made to make them accessible to all. 

“Since the beginning of my academic career, my research interests have been towards socially impactful projects. Public service, especially for underrepresented communities, runs in my family,” Saha said. “The driving force for the work I do stems from my role model, my father, who dedicated his life towards rural and agricultural development in India. His selfless efforts inspired me to explore how technology can be used for the betterment of society. With this goal in mind, I set out to do my Ph.D. with a focus on high-value social problems.”

Saha works with Froehlich in the Makeability Lab on one of its flagship ventures, Project Sidewalk. The project has two goals: to develop and study data collection methods for acquiring street-level accessibility information using crowdsourcing, machine learning, and online map imagery and to design and develop navigation and map tools for accessibility.