Aashaka Desai

Aashaka is a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She is advised by Dr. Jennifer Mankoff and Dr. Richard Ladner. In 2020, she graduated from University of Delaware with Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Cognitive Science. Her research interests are in the fields of accessibility and language — specifically how we can use technology to make the world more accessible. She firmly believes communication should not be a privilege — so she hopes to use her background in computer science and cognitive science to think of integrative approaches to multifaceted problems.

You can read more about Aashaka’s research at https://aashakadesai.github.io/

Jerry Cao

Jerry is a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. In the past, he served as an Undergraduate Research Leader with the Undergraduate Research Program at UW and a Mary Gates Scholar.  

His research focuses on utilizing fabrication and computer science to make healthcare technologies more affordable and accessible to the general populous. His current projects include generating optimized 3D-printable tactile maps and designing a cheap, unobtrusive continuous blood pressure monitor.

Website: https://jerrycao22.github.io/

Han Zhang

Han is a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. She is advised by Prof Jennifer Mankoff (Computer Science) and Prof Anind K. Dey (Information School). She completed her first PhD in mathematics at Northwest University in 2018. During that time, she was a visitor at Nanyang Technological University for two years, hosted by Prof Chaoping Xing.

Her research interests lie in human behavior modeling and the design of computer-aided methods to improve human well-being. She is also interested in fairness in machine learning and building explainable ML. Her recent projects focus on building deployable machine learning to early predict academic performance of college students by leveraging multiple types of data, understanding their academic-related behaviors, and evaluating the fairness in the models.

Daniel Revier

Daniel is a first-year PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. He is advised by Drs. Jennifer Mankoff (Computer Science) and Jeffrey Lipton (Mechanical Engineering). He graduated from Texas A&M University with a BS in Electrical Engineering (2012) and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech (2016) and afterwards worked at Texas Instruments Kilby Research Labs (2016-2019).

Daniel’s research interests lie at the intersection of inverse design, additive manufacturing, and accessibility of fabrication. His prior work focused on industrial scale additive manufacturing applications; however, he has since turned his focus toward software solutions to enable the design of intricate digital models with minimal effort.

Kelly Mack

Kelly is a Phd Student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She is advised by Prof. Jennifer Mankoff. She completed her bachelors in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, where she was advised by Prof. Aditya Parameswaran and Prof. Karrie Karahalios. She is an NSF Fellow and an ARCS Scholar.

Her research focuses on applying computer science and fabrication techniques to create or improve technologies that serve people with disabilities. Her recent projects focus on deaf and hard of hearing people and people with visual impairments, such as investigating the accessibility issues Deaf signers face on social media and improving tactile map creation for people who have visual impairments.

Visit Kelly’s homepage at https://kmack3.github.io

Venkatesh Potluri

Venkatesh Potluri is a Ph.D. student at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at University of Washington. He is advised by Prof Jennifer Mankoff and Prof Jon Froehlich. Venkatesh believes that technology, when designed right, empowers everybody to fulfill their goals and aspirations. His broad research goals are to upgrade accessibility to the ever-changing ways of our interactions with technology, and, improve the independence and quality of life of people with disabilities. These goals stem from his personal experience as a researcher with a visual impairment. His research focus is to enable developers with visual impairments perform a variety of programming tasks efficiently. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India, where his team was responsible for building CodeTalk, an accessibility framework and a plugin for better IDE accessibility. Venkatesh earned a master’s degree in Computer Science at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, where his research was on audio rendering of mathematical content.

You can find more information about him at https://venkateshpotluri.me

Orson (Xuhai) Xu

Orson is a Ph.D. student working with Jennifer Mankoff  and Anind K. Dey in the Information School at the University of Washington – Seattle. Prior to joining UW, he obtained his Bachelor’s degrees in Industrial Engineering (major) and Computer Science (minor) from Tsinghua University in 2018. While at Tsinghua, he received Best Paper Honorable Mentioned Award (CHI 2018), Person of the Year Award and Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. His research focuses on two aspects in the intersection of human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing and machine learning: 1) the modeling of human behavior such as routine behavior and 2) novel interaction techniques.

Visit Orson’s homepage at : orsonxu.com

Some recent projects (see more)