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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.

  • Collaborative News: From “Narcotweets” to Journalism-as-a-Service

    Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a researcher at Microsoft Research, and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His work focuses on the design and study of social computing systems for large scale collaboration. His research has received best paper awards at CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, and HCOMP, recognized at Ars Electronica, and featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and Wired. Andrés was named one of the TR35 Innovators by the MIT Technology Review (Spanish), and one of CNET's influential Latinos in Tech. He holds a Ph.D.

  • How UX Techniques Promote Simulation Software for Everyone

    Imran Riaz is a passionate and experienced UX leader.  He is currently leading the UX group for ANSYS, a multi-Billion-dollar software company based right here in Pittsburgh. In his current role he manages a diverse and multi-disciplinary team for Design Research, Product Design and Experience Strategy practices. He has been working in the software industry for over 20 years with an emphasis on great user experience as well as promoting the UX discipline itself.

  • If the Shoe Fits: Towards A Conceptual Model for Applied Deep Learning in Social Computing

    Dr. Carolyn Rosé is a Professor of Language Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  Her research program is focused on better understanding the social and pragmatic nature of conversation, and using this understanding to build computational systems that can improve the efficacy of conversation between people, and between people and computers.

  • Blur - The Disappearing Lines Between Us and The Technologies We Create

    Chip Walter is an filmmaker, journalist, and consultant on the future effects of emerging technologies. He has an unusually diverse background as an author, documentary film producer, feature film screenwriter and former CNN San Francisco bureau chief. More recently he has served as National Programming Director at WQED-TV, CEO of Digital Alchemy, Inc. and Vice-President and Executive Producer of ENGAGE Games Online. Chip is author of Random House’s Space Age, a companion book to the primetime PBS series of the same title which he developed for WQED.

  • Interfaces on the Road: Rapid Evaluation of In-Vehicle Devices

    Bonnie John is an engineer (B.Engr., The Cooper Union, 1977; M. Engr. Stanford, 1978) and cognitive psychologist (M.S. Carnegie Mellon, 1984; Ph. D. Carnegie Mellon, 1988) who has worked both in industry (Bell Laboratories, 1977–1983) and academe (Carnegie Mellon University, 1988–present). She is an Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Director of the Masters Program in HCI. Her research includes human performance modeling, usability evaluation methods, and the relationship between usability and software architecture.

  • More Natural Programming Through User Studies

    Brad A. Myers is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the principal investigator for various research projects including: the Pebbles Hand-Held Computer Project, Natural Programming, User Interface Software, and Demonstrational Interfaces. He is the author or editor of over 275 publications, including the books Creating User Interfaces by Demonstration and Languages for Developing User Interfaces, and he is on the editorial board of five journals.

  • Recent Shortcuts: Using Recent Interactions to Support Shared Activities

    John C. Tang is a Research Staff Member at the Almaden Research Center of IBM Research. John’s research interests focus on understanding the needs of users and designing new technology to support collaboration. He likes to apply a mix of qualitative (interviews, surveys, video-based observation) and quantitative (usage logs) methods to understand how people currently accomplish their work, leading to new design insights for tools to support their work. John received his Ph.D.

  • The GroupLens Research Project: Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems

    Joseph A. Konstan is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research addresses a variety of human-computer interaction issues related to filtering, comprehending, organizing, and automating large and complex data sets. He is probably best known for his work in collaborative filtering (the GroupLens recommender system) and multimedia authoring. In 1996, he co-founded Net Perceptions, Inc., a company that has since developed collaborative filtering systems into variety of commercial personalization tools.

  • From Disasters to WoW: Understanding & Enabling Networks in 21st Century Organizational Forms

    Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He directs the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University and is a Research Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  • HCII Special Seminar - Josiah Hester

    Josiah Hester is the Breed Chair of Design and Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. He works in intermittent computing and battery-free embedded computing systems. He applies his work to health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for sustainability and conservation, supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, and DARPA. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022.