HCII News

HCII PhD student Aruna Balakrishnan received the IBM PhD fellowship and the IBM Fran Allen Fellowship given to just one of the IBM fellowship recipients each year. Established in 2007, the Fran Allen Ph.D. Fellowship Award is awarded to a female Ph.D. research student based on her outstanding technical accomplishments and commitment to mentoring and community-building.

HCII PhD student Chris Harrison was one of the recipients of the highly competitive 2010 Microsoft fellowships. There were 176 nominations for these fellowships worldwide, and only 10 were granted. The Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship is a two-year fellowship program for outstanding PhD students nominated by their universities.

On Monday, November 30, you are invited to attend a free taping on campus of the CNBC special program, Meeting of the Minds. The program will feature leading manufacturing executives and CNBC host Maria Bartiromo. For free tickets to this show, go to cmutickets.cnbc.com to register.

Seven executives of Sesame Workshop, the non-profit group behind public television’s “Sesame Street,” will discuss the trailblazing show for pre-schoolers and about their re-launch of “The Electric Company” during a talk at 9:30 a.m., Wednesday, Nov. 4 in the Rashid Auditorium on the fourth floor of the Hillman Center for Future-Generation Technologies.

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University today announced the expansion of its Mobile & Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE) project, which will gauge the effectiveness of mobile phone-based games for teaching English lessons to students in rural India.

Julia Schwarz, a first year HCII PhD student, took First Place in the Most Creative category at this year’s ACM UIST Student Innovation Contest. She was assisted by Brian Lim, Stephen Oney and Kevin Huang. This year’s contest centered around a prototype pressure-sensitive keyboard developed by Microsoft. A description of their entry, the Magnetic Keyboard, is included below:

Julia Schwarz, Bryan Pendleton, and Chris Harrison hacked together two entries in the 24-hour development period. The team was flown out to the New York City to participate in OpenHackNYC after winning the CMU-wide HackU event last October.

News | Sabrina Porte

August 31, 2009

An iPhone, Skype, and Google street view were all it took for one lucky Carnegie Mellon student to catch a group of armed robbers. Can Duruk, a senior cognitive science and human-computer interaction double major, was attacked by two armed men just before midnight on Friday night, and by 4 a.m. had led the police to the actors and identified both of them in a police lineup. Duruk’s story was completely made possible by the technology on his iPhone that he found on the Internet.

HCII faculty members Noboru Matsuda and Ken Koedinger (with William Cohen at MLD and Gabriel Stylianides at Pitt) received new grants from the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education and the NSF REESE program (REESE = Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering). The total of $1.9 million grant started this summer and supports a three year project entitled “Learning by Teaching a Synthetic Student: Using SimStudent to Study the Effect of Tutor Learning.”

HCII faculty member Bruce McLaren received a new grant from the U.S. Department of Education IES program (Institute of Education Science), entitled “AdaptErrEx: Exploring the Learning Benefits of Erroneous Examples and Their Dynamic Adaptations within the Context of Middle School Mathematics. The $1.3 million grant starts in September 2009 and runs for three years.

Carnegie Mellon University today announced the beta release of Alice 3, the latest version of an innovative software environment designed to take something challenging — learning about computer programming — and make it as fun as creating an animated movie or a video game.

HCII faculty members Vincent Aleven and Nikol Rummel received a new grant, from the NSF REESE program (Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering), entitled “Learning with multiple graphical representations in a complex, real-world domain: intelligent software tutors for fractions.” The grant is for three years and for a total of one million dollars.

First-year HCII graduate student Martina Rau wins the Best Student Paper Award at the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2009, which was held in Brighton, UK, July 6–10.

Carnegie Learning Inc. has announced a three-year partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and universities in Mexico, Central America, and South America to develop Cognitive Tutor® math software for secondary school students that is adapted to the regional contexts and languages of their countries.

Researchers from the School of Computer Science have developed two new tools to help computer programmers select from among thousands of options within the application programming interfaces (APIs) that are used to write applications in Java, today’s most popular programming language. The tools—Jadeite and Apatite—take advantage of human-centered design techniques to significantly reduce the time and guesswork associated with finding the right classes and methods of APIs.

Authors from Carnegie Mellon and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, in particular, had a great presence at CHI 2009, the premier conference in Human-Computer Interaction. They presented 26 full papers, with six of these nominated for Best Paper Awards.

This year the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Sara Kiesler. The Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious award SIGCHI gives.

Chris Harrison’s visualization work was selected as runner up (honorable mention) in the illustration category of the NSF/Science 2008 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge and will appear in this month’s issue of Science.

Bilge Mutlu and his collaborators, Toshiyuki Shiwa, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita, from ATR in Japan, won the Best Paper Award at the 2009 Human-Robot Interaction Conference for their paper, titled “Footing In Human-Robot Conversations: How Robots Might Shape Participant Roles Using Gaze Cues.” This is Bilge’s second Best Paper Award at the Human-Robot Interaction Conference.

PhD student Ian Li wins the 2009 SCS Smiley Award for innovation in technology-assisted person-to-person communication for his project Grafitter.