| Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Support HCI Team and Stroke Patients by Voting in Chasing Genius Innovation Challenge

the three Wabbit team members stand on South Craig Street for a photo

Uprooting beets on an augmented reality farm could soon help recovering stroke victims improve their motor skills if a team of human-computer interaction students receives enough votes by tomorrow night. The team of three Carnegie Mellon HCI students behind Wabbit, one of only ten finalists remaining in the National Geographic CHASING GENIUS: UNLIMITED INNOVATION idea challenge, is currently in fourth place.

Hong Receives 2019 Amazon Research Award

Professor Jason Hong was awarded a 2019 Amazon Research Award in support of the project "Designing Alternative Representations of Confusion Matrices to Evaluate Public Perceptions of Fairness in Machine Learning."

Hong is the first from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute to receive the Amazon Research Award, which is now in its fifth year.

Shedding Light (and Sound) on Hidden IoT Devices in Your Next Hotel Room

3 side by side drawings of a bookshelf, where the IoT devices are circled

Fifty Years Into "Picturephones," CMU Revamps Original Machine With Modern Twist

looking over the shoulder of McGee, picturephone and typewriter are on the table. Harrison's face is on the picturephone's screen.

"Some people in Pittsburgh are seeing voices."

That's how AT&T Bell Laboratories advertised its first commercial Picturephone in 1970. The print ad goes on to say that while it would be a lot of work to build a new type of communication network, "Picturephone service is a reality in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," and will soon be available in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

Zazzle Uses MHCI Capstone Ideas To Create New Products

6 capstone teammates sit on the floor below a large affinity diagram on the infamous 'MHCI green wall'

Wuyang Wang knew she got lucky last year. Then a student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute's (HCII) Master of Human-Computer Interaction program (MHCI), she was assigned to a capstone project team for Zazzle, a platform that brings people together to design, make, sell, purchase or even share products online.

Perception of Privacy-Utility Tradeoffs in Contact-Tracing Apps Key to Widespread Adoption

CMU Researchers Find Users Prefer Centralized System

Contact-tracing could help curb the spread of COVID-19. While the process can be performed manually, researchers have suggested that digital contact tracing using cell phones could be a more accurate and scalable approach. But its effectiveness relies heavily on a large installation rate — and that may depend on how people weigh the app's utility versus its privacy risks.

Study Questions Benefits of Social Networks to Disaster Response

Hirokazu Shirado stands in hallway between Gates and NSH buildings

Communication Within Groups Not as Helpful as Anticipated

Faced with a common peril, people delay making decisions that might save lives, fail to alert each other to danger and spread misinformation. Those may sound like behaviors associated with the current pandemic, but they actually surfaced in experiments on how social networks function in emergencies.

HCII Responds to the Pandemic

4 images: 3D printed mask, a chart, illustration of student high fiveing teacher & US map counties

As stay-at-home orders swept across the country during the Covid-19 pandemic, our researchers answered the call to help others.

When the campus announced it would close, they packed up and relocated the 3D printers. They applied for grants. They adjusted ongoing research projects and they even started new ones -- all from their homes.

Self-Healing Devices Gain or Regain Function After Being Cut

a heart covered in the self-hearling polymer has been sliced in half

A "smart" polymer cast that automatically seals itself around a broken arm, a membrane that can sense where it has been cut, and pneumatic actuators that can be cut and reconfigured into different shapes are some possible applications for a new self-healing material developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

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