Avery is a Phd Student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. They are advised by Prof. Jennifer Mankoff. They completed their bachelors in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, where Prof. Aditya Parameswaran and Prof. Karrie Karahalios advised them. They are an NSF Fellow and an ARCS Scholar.
Their research focuses on applying computer science to create or improve technologies that serve people with disabilities. Their current work focuses on 1) representation of people with disabilities in digital technologies like avatars and generative AI tools, and 2) how to support people with fluctuating access needs like neurodiverse people and people with chronic or mental health conditions.
Yash is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. While at make4all lab, Yash worked under the mentorship of Prof. Jennifer Mankoff and Dr. Anat Caspi on the Urban Mobility project. He was responsible of recruiting participants with a diverse range of abilities, conducting contextual interviews, survey monitoring, data collection and data analysis for majority of the pool of participants. His time at the make4all lab taught him to be inclusive of the different abilities of people while designing and developing technology. Yash will be interested in taking up projects in the future that aim to develop universally accessible technologies.
James Gan is a M.S. Technology Innovation student at the Global Innovation Exchange program at the University of Washington. He is working with Megan Hofmann on a project expanding on the work of her paper “PARTs: Expressing and Reusing Design Intent in 3D Models”, particularly towards allowing the system to create Advanced Tactile Maps. He pursues numerous personal projects, and is an avid Hackathon attendee, having won prizes from Google, BlackRock, and Bloomberg. He hopes to grow his Computer Science skills as much as possible while a student, to help him pursue becoming a Product Manager and potentially pursuing a Ph.D. in the future.
Previously, James was a Program Manager and Consultant at srnd.org, working with Microsoft Philanthropies and managing CodeDay, a series of 24 hour events to promote CS education. Through this role, he was able to promote equality in CS education and get hundreds of students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue CS studies. He graduated from Cornell University in 2018 with a B.A. in Economics with minors in Computer Science, Information Science, and Asian American Studies.
Hi, I’m Minxuan Gao and I’m a senior in Tsinghua University majoring in Software Engineering. I’m always passionate about creating new and innovative way of people interacting with every day objects by seeing, touching, listening using data-driven methods. My research focus lies in Human Computer Interaction and I am currently working on the SPRITEs project.
I am a PhD student at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. My current research is focused on human behavior modeling. More specifically, I model and study routine behaviors and the impact of external events on them in the context of wellbeing and mobility. I am also interested in end-user tools and interfaces to improve data collection, exploration, and analysis processes.
My past research spans from designing interfaces for end-user robot programming, to modeling human-object interactions in realistic videos, to studying affective haptic human-robot interaction for psychological enrichment.
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.
Xin is a first-year Ph.D. student with Jennifer Mankoff and Shwetak Patel in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington – Seattle. Prior to joining UW, he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2018. While at UMass Amherst, he received a 21st Century Leaders Award, Rising Researcher Award, and Outstanding Undergraduate Achievements Award. He is interested in using wearable sensing, human-computer interaction and machine learning to advancing healthcare.
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.
Hi, I’m Yuqian Sun and I’m an exchange student from University of Tokyo, Japan. I’m interested in how technology can combine with the human cognition, persuade and as a result, change human behavior. My research field is human computer interaction and Ubiquitous Computing. I’m currently working on SPRITEs and Interactiles project.
My name is Ying Wang and I am a junior double majoring in Computer Science and Applied & Computational Mathematical Science. I am interested in the communication between Nature, Human and Technology. She is fascinated by the unlimited potential and profound meaning revealed by data communication and how human-centered design plays an essential role in bridging the gaps in between human expression and technology realization. I am currently working on the Don’t Touch My Belly project in the lab.
