HCII in the Media

Jason Hong, associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, was featured on CBS This Morning in a Dec. 26 segment about the information that smartphone apps collect about their users. He explained that the developers of many free apps provide this user information to advertisers and marketers.

BusinessInsider.com ranks Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute 9th on its list of the world’s best design schools. CMU’s School of Design is ranked 4th. BusinessInsider.com reports it conducted a survey with 633 respondents who ranked schools somewhat valuable, valuable or extremely valuable.

When David Murray was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, his friends used to kid him that he’d never find a job that combined all three of his majors—computer science and human-computer interaction (HCI) in the School of Computer Science, and voice performance in the School of Music.

Anind Dey, associate professor of HCII, presented his dwellSense project on Oct. 16 at the Wired Health Conference in New York City.

HCII Professor Scott Hudson and Karl D.D. Willis, a PhD student in CMU’s Computational Design Lab who is co-advised by Hudson, have worked with Disney Research, Pittsburgh, to adapt 3D printing to create customized, interactive devices that have optical sensors, display and illumination elements embedded directly in their structure.

HCII PhD student Chris Harrison, working with colleagues at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, has helped develop a technique called capacitive fingerprinting which enables touchscreens or other objects to tell the difference between users based just on their touch (video).

HCII Director Justine Cassell was the featured “Newsmaker” Sept. 8 in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The column noted Cassell is the Charles M. Geschke Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, as newly endowed by Geschke, a CMU alumnus and co-founder of Adobe Systems Inc., and his wife, Nancy.

MIT’s Technology Review has named Chris Harrison to its annual TR35 list of innovators under the age of 35. He and the rest of the 2012 honorees are featured in the magazine’s September/October issue.

Gizmag, along with Wired, TechCrunch and other media outlets, has a feature on Touché, a new touch-sensing technology developed at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, with a team that included Chris Harrison, a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Technology Review took early notice of Livehoods, a project undertaken by Jason Hong, associate professor of HCII; Raz Schwartz, a visiting HCII scholar from Bar-Ilan University; Norman Sadeh, professor of computer science in the Institute for Software Research, and Justin Cranshaw, a PhD student in ISR.