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.
We design, build, and evaluate new interactive tools and techniques to address pressing societal challenges. Makeability refers both to how our technological innovations make new abilities possible for humans as well as our educational mission to help students gain new abilities as they learn and grow through research, invention, and human-centered design.