HCII News

Technology blogs have been abuzz that smartwatches may soon be on their way from companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft. But as capable as these ultra-small computers may be, how will users enter an address, a name, or a search term into them? One solution is an iterative zooming technique developed and tested by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

Online crowds can be an important tool for teaching the ins and outs of innovation, educators at Carnegie Mellon University and Northwestern University say, even when the quality of the feedback provided by online sources doesn’t always match the quantity.

Researchers previously have shown that a depth camera system, such as Kinect, can be combined with a projector to turn almost any surface into a touchscreen. But now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated how these touch-based interfaces can be created almost at will, with the wave of a hand.

Playpower Labs, a company co-founded by Derek Lomas, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, was one of three companies receiving top honors in the 2013 McGinnis Venture Competition.

It may take two to tango, but payments now are as easy as one touch.

Four Carnegie Mellon University seniors tired of digging through backpacks, pockets and purses for their student identification and debit cards have developed PayTango, a fingerprint-based identification and payment system.

Students of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute were among the Carnegie Mellon innovators and spin-off companies featured at Innovation City during the South By Southwest Interactive Festival.

Carnegie Mellon University’s John R. Anderson — whose human thought and cognition research has revolutionized how we learn — has been selected to receive the Association for Psychological Science’s (APS) William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research.

A hit song is often the product of co-writers who have great chemistry. But the elements that make the chemistry great aren’t always apparent.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University analyzed an online songwriting community to shed light on this subject, and what they discovered may surprise you.

The Web makes it possible for lots of people to collaborate on projects, but it doesn’t make it easy to lead them. A Carnegie Mellon University researcher has developed a new tool that helps leaders see complex, collaborative projects through to completion by redistributing leadership responsibilities.

A musical collaboration, be it Rodgers and Hammerstein or Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, requires a mix of shared and complementary traits that is not always obvious. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University discovered elements of this unique chemistry by using an automated technique to analyze an online songwriting community.

Crowdsourcing is an effective way to mobilize people to accomplish tasks on a global scale, but some researchers fear that crowd work for pay could easily become the high-tech equivalent of a sweat shop. Trivial work for rock bottom pay isn’t inevitable, however, and they’ve outlined a research agenda to make crowd work both intellectually and monetarily rewarding.

People are often surprised to learn that popular mobile applications on their smartphones are sharing their location, contact lists and other sensitive information, Carnegie Mellon University researchers say.

A new one-year professional master’s program in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute will train graduates to apply evidence-based learning science research in re-examining the goals of education and in designing educational technology.

The Carnegie Mellon research team that created Tiramisu, a smartphone app that enables transit riders to create realtime information about bus schedules and seating, has won this year’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman’s Award for Advancement in Accessibility in the Geo-Location Services category.

A team of four Carnegie Mellon undergraduates spent 24 hours transforming an idea for a simulation game into reality at Facebook’s Global Hackathon Finals, which began Nov. 30 in Menlo Park, Calif. The team finished fourth among 18 teams from 17 universities and four countries.

Four Carnegie Mellon University faculty members have been named 2013 Fellows of the Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional association.

Justine Cassell, the Charles M. Geschke Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of two Carnegie Mellon University faculty members to receive the honor this year.

HCII Professor Scott Hudson, along with his Disney colleagues Karl D. D. Willis, Eric Brockmeyer, and Ivan Poupyrev, received the First Place Best Demo Award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, as well as a nomination for a best paper award, for “Printed Optics: 3D Printing of Embedded Optical Elements for Interactive Devices.”

Congratulations to HCII PhD student Jeff Rzeszotarski and HCII Assistant Professor Aniket Kittur on their best paper award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University will field two teams in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, a competition in which robots will perform complex, physically challenging tasks as they respond to disaster scenarios in human-engineered environments, such as nuclear p