Google Faculty Award on GlassEar
Dr. Leah Findlater and I were just awarded a Google Faculty Research Award for our work on wearable sound awareness support for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing. This project, codenamed GlassEar, began as a collaboration back in 2014 with Dhruv Jain, then a visiting researcher and now an incoming PhD student. [read more]
NSF CAREER Award!
I'm excited to announce that our group just received an NSF CAREER Award to develop and study new interfaces, techniques, and tools to enable young children (ages 5-10) to program, build, and use their own interactive wearables. I've been working on this project since about the time I arrived at UMD, and I'm so happy that it is now funded. Lab member (and MS student) Majeed Kazemitabaar has been absolutely critical in the past few years to making this project what it is today. Our first paper on this work will be published at CHI2017. Hope to see you there!
See also this UMIACS news release.
Project Sidewalk Listed on Citizenscience.gov
Project Sidewalk is now listed on citizenscience.gov (direct link). Citizenscience.gov is "an official government website designed to accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the U.S. government." Check it out! [read more]
Project Sidewalk presents at WalkHackNight II
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. [read more]
Majeed Kazemitabaar visiting UC Berkeley
Majeed Kazemitabaar will be a visiting student researcher this semester at UC Berkeley's Institute of Design (BiD Lab) to work with Prof. Bjoern Hartmann. He will be researching on tangible machine learning for children as part of his ongoing work with MakerWear. [read more]
Project Sidewalk Featured on UMD Homepage
Project Sidewalk is currently featured on the UMD homepage. This is some nice recognition at the university level about our work. Link to the article: Clear The Way: UMD Computer Scientists Seek Public Help Mapping Sidewalk Accessibility
Graduation Gift for Kotaro
The Makeability Lab came together to collectively design and make a custom, laser-cut plaque for Kotaro in Japanese and English for a graduation gift. Congrats Dr. Hara! Special thanks to Majeed for vectorizing my designs, to Liang for designing and creating the custom 3D-printed plaque stand, and to Art Faculty Brandon Morse for letting us use his Epilog laser cutter. [read more]
Congrats Dr. Kotaro Hara and Ladan Najafizadeh, MS
Congratulations to Dr. Kotaro Hara and Ladan Najafizadeh for graduating with their PhD and MS degrees respectively. It was a tremendous honor to hood Kotaro as my first student and a pleasure to watch Ladan walk across the commencement stage knowing how hard she worked for her MS thesis. Here's a video of Dr. Kotaro Hara being hooded (direct link): https://youtu.be/FoCuAtR6V-A?t=1h1m3s And Ladan walking across the stage receiving her MS degree: https://youtu.be/FoCuAtR6V-A?t=1h5m24s [read more]
Congratulations to Matt Mauriello for Passing his PhD Proposal
Congratulations to Matt Mauriello for passing his PhD proposal on mixed-initiative methods to scale thermographic energy auditing in space and time. Matt has much to celebrate this semester with getting into the Clark Faculty Fellow program, receiving two CHI paper acceptances, and now becoming a PhD candidate. Congrats Matt! And thanks to Andrea Wiggins and David Jacobs for serving on his committee. [read more]
Five Papers Accepted to CHI2017
The Makeability Lab had five papers accepted to CHI2017! We'll see you in Denver in May! [read more]
