News & Events
You're in the right place to keep up with department news and upcoming events at the HCI Institute.
View our recent news stories below. Looking for an upcoming event? Visit our website calendar to view our public events, including our weekly Seminar Series on Friday afternoons.
Session Two Final Exams
Reading Day
HCII Seminar Series: Neil Alexander co-sponsored by QoLT
Neil is an authentic, funny and talented speaker from his days as a senior executive with Pittsburgh-based investment advisory firm Hefren-Tillotson, Inc. Since his diagnosis in 2011, he has spoken at numerous corporate, private and community events regarding gratitude and the challenges of facing a serious health crisis. Neil and Suzanne Alexander founded LiveLikeLou.org, a donor advised fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation, shortly after Neil’s diagnosis with ALS in 2011.
Design History: The Bauhaus
Karen Kornblum Berntsen specializes in design, and has taught classes in interaction design, typography and the visual display of complex information. Karen has a BFA in drawing and printmaking, and an MS in interactive media. She has received numerous national and international design awards for her work, some of which was included in the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
PhD Thesis Proposal, "Social Media Neighborhood Guides"
TALK CANCELED: How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design
Katherine Isbister is a full professor in the University of California, Santa Cruz's Department of Computational Media, where she is core faculty in the Center for Games and Playable Media. Prior to joining UCSC, she was the founding director of the Game Innovation Lab at NYU. Her research at the intersection of games and HCI focuses on designing playful interactive experiences that heighten social and emotional connections, toward innovating design theory and technological practice. Isbister’s most recent book from MIT Press is How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design.
HCII PhD Thesis Defense: Erik Harpstead
HCII PhD Thesis Defense: Robert Xiao, "Enabling Interaction on Everyday Surfaces"
HCII PhD Thesis Proposal: Xu Wang, "Sourcing Student Open-Ended Solutions to Create Scalable Learning Opportunities"
HCI Undergraduate Programs Information Session
Interactive Music and Media with Aura
Roger B. Dannenberg is a Senior Research Computer Scientist and Artist at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1982. He is internationally known for his research in the field of computer music. His current work includes research on computer accompaniment of live musicians, content-based music retrieval, interactive media, and high-level languages for sound synthesis. Products based on his computer accompaniment research are used by music students around the world.
Seminar: Martin Robillard
Martin Robillard is Professor of Computer Science at McGill University. His current research focuses on problems related to software evolution, architecture and design, and software reuse. He served as the Program Co-Chair for the 20th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2012) and the 39th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017). He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia and a B.Eng. from École Polytechnique de Montréal.
Integrated Collision Warning System for Transit Buses
Christoph Mertz, a Project Scientist in NavLab, is an expert on data analysis, sensor development, surround sensing, intelligent transportation systems, and collision warning algorithms. He earned a doctorate in physics prior to joining the Robotics Institute.
PhD These Defense: Toby Li, "A Multi-Modal Intelligent Agent that Learns from Demonstrations and Natural Language Instructions"
Building Cognitive Model for Tutoring by Demonstration
Dr. Noboru Matsuda is a post doctoral fellow at Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh in 2004. Prior to that he was a visiting scholar at the Learning Research and Development Center at Pitt from University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests are at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive theories of learning and teaching.
HCII Seminar Series - Jay Aronson
Jay Aronson is the founder and director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also Professor of Science, Technology, and Society in the History Department. Aronson’s research and teaching focus on the interactions of science, technology, law, media, and human rights in a variety of contexts. He is currently writing a book with Roger Mitchell, Jr., the Chief Medical Examiner of Washington, DC, that addresses significant shortcomings in the way police killings and deaths in custody are recorded and investigated in the United States.
Undergraduate HCII Admissions Closes Today
The Interdisciplinary Challenge of Building Virtual Worlds
Randy Pausch is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he is the co-director of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. In 1995, he spent a Sabbatical with the Walt Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, and currently consults with Imagineering on interactive theme park attractions, particularly for the “DisneyQuest” virtual-reality based theme park.
CHAINALYSIS: Crypto Capstone
The Aura Project - An Expedition into Invisible Computing
Daniel Siewiorek is the Buhl professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science. He helped initiate and guide the Cm* project that culminated in an operational 50-processor systems. He was a key contributor in the design of over two dozen commercial computing systems and designed or was involved in designing nine multiprocessor systems. He guided the design of 20 generations of mobile computing systems.