I am an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I received my PhD in Computer Science from theUniversity of British Columbia. My doctoral dissertation was awarded the Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Annual Award. Prior to joining CMU’s faculty, I was a Research Scientist working in the Disney Research Zurich lab. I am interested in a variety of research topics that include control strategies for virtual actors and robots, motion planning algorithms, physics-based modeling and simulation, computational design and digital fabrication. For my work in these areas, I was the recipient of an Intel Early Career Faculty Award. TedXZurich and Robotics Institute Seminar talks I gave are available online.

I am looking for motivated students and postdocs with strong mathematical backgrounds and a passion for computer graphics and/or robotics.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scoros/

My research spans HCI, accessibility, crowdsourcing, human computation, artificial intelligence, social computing, computer vision, machine learning, and language technologies.

Currently, I am focused on four broad projects:

• Transitioning crowd-powered systems to automation. I’m working on integrating speech and language technology into Chorus; automatic speech recognition into Scribe; and, automatic computer vision into VizWiz and Zensors.
• Creating a more accessible Web with WebAnywhere, and by crowdsourcing accessibility improvements to existing web content.
• Working to understand dyslexia using human-computer interaction measures, creating tools that help people with dyslexia read and write better, and eventually building tools to diagnose dyslexia earlier and easier.
• Creating a brighter future for crowd workers through education and training. I’m working to design tasks that leverage the expertise that crowd workers already have, and tasks that allow workers to build useful skills while they work.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/

Robert E. Kraut
Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science
Tepper School of Business
Center for the Future of Work, Heinz College
Carnegie Mellon University
Ph.D., Social Psychology, Yale University, 1973

Dr. Kraut has broad interests in the design and social impact of computing and has conducted empirical research on online communities, the social impact of the internet on personal relationships and psychological well-being, the design of information technology for small-group intellectual work, the communication needs of collaborating scientists, the impact of business computer technologies on organizational networks employment quality and home-based employment. He is a fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the Association of Computing Machinery.

His recent research has focused on the analysis and design of online communities, such as health-support communities, Facebook groups, guilds in multi-player games, and Wikipedia project. This research consists of both empirical analyses of how they operate, such as how they socialize newcomers and they coordinate their work, and interventions to improve their operation. He is the coauthor of Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, a handbook published by MIT Press.

He wrote a biographical essay, Re-engineering social encounters, in 2003 for the American Psychological Association. In 1980, his research on the evolution of the human facial expressions won a Proxmire Golden Fleece award. His biographical essay, Why bowlers smile, and Ed Diener’s essay, Why Robert Kraut smiles, describe the legacy of that award. CMU’s School of Computer Science alumni magazine recently published an article describing his role in the formation of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

http://kraut.hciresearch.org/