It was a pleasure to meet Professor Youngki Lee and his students during their visit to our lab. We discussed our work in augmented reality and computer vision as well as their new approaches to edge computing and ML. Thank you for the visit!

The Project Sidewalk team led a session at the 2023 PacTrans-WSDOT Summer High School Transportation Camp talking about urban design, human mobility, and disability. Students also participated in interactive activities related to sidewalk accessibility and discussed their own experiences with inaccessible transit and urban design.

We had a fun visit from Josh Myers-Dean, a PhD student from the University of Colorado Boulder interested in computer vision and accessibility. Thank you Josh for visiting!  

It was so wonderful to finally meet our collaborator and Utah State University Professor Brent Chamberlain. Thank you Brent for stopping by with your family to Seattle. Such a joy to meet you and soak up some of your infectious energy and positivity. Professor Chamberlain is PI on our NSF Convergence grant and seemingly has infinite overlapping personal and professional interests with me! The picture below is from my "famous" green screen in my home teaching studio that shows up often in my Zoom calls (or does it?!).

The Project Sidewalk team led a session at the 2023 PacTrans-WSDOT Summer High School Transportation Camp talking about urban design, human mobility, and disability. Students also participated in interactive activities related to sidewalk accessibility and discussed their own experiences with inaccessible transit and urban design.

It was so wonderful to finally meet our collaborator and Utah State University Professor Brent Chamberlain. Thank you Brent for stopping by with your family to Seattle. Such a joy to meet you and soak up some of your infectious energy and positivity.

Professor Chamberlain is PI on our NSF Convergence grant and seemingly has infinite overlapping personal and professional interests with me!

The picture below is from my "famous" green screen in my home teaching studio that shows up often in my Zoom calls (or does it?!).

Project Sidewalk collaborator Kie Fujii—who recently graduated from Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in New Jersey—presented our work on Project Sidewalk in Oradell, NJ at the 2023 Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers in Aurora, Colorado.

In Kie's words:

 The poster presentation was a huge hit! Several people were excited to learn about this project and wanted to implement this work in their towns. 

Thanks to Kie for presenting on our team's behalf and congrats and best wishes to her as she starts as a medical resident at UC San Diego.

We were honored and excited to take part in UW's Accessible Technology Research Showcase co-hosted by UW CREATE and HuskyADAPT. It was a truly wonderful and inspiring event—with a scale and scope rivaling many conference poster/demo sessions (and this was all UW work!).

Lab members Daniel Campos Zamora, Chu Li, and Katrina Ma all presented work. Congrats team!

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.