CIFellow, Alexis E. Block began her CIFellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles in September 2021. Block is mentored by Veronica J. Santos, Director of the UCLA Biomechatronics Laboratory, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the school’s Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and Faculty Affairs. Prior to beginning her CIFellowship, she received her Dr. sc. from ETH Zurich where she was a part of a joint program called the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems. Block recently won the Otto Hahn Medal from Germany’s Max Planck Society for her dissertation work in human-robot interaction and the development of the “HuggieBot” which you can read about here. […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Research Opportunities in Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction workshop report. The CCC’s 1.5 day Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction workshop took place in April 2018 in New Orleans, co-located with the Society for Behavioral Medicine’s 39th Annual Meeting. This cross-disciplinary workshop, brought together leading researchers in computing, health informatics, and behavioral medicine to develop an integrative research agenda regarding sociotechnical interventions to reduce health disparities and improve the health of socio-economically disadvantaged populations. “Health disparities are differences in disease prevalence, incidence, morbidity and/or mortality in one group as compared to the general population. In Western countries, groups which experience disparities in health outcomes […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently held a visioning workshop in Atlanta, GA to discuss and articulate research visions for authoring rich graphical content for new workforce training. The workshop’s goal was to articulate research challenges and needs and to summarize the current state of the practice in this area. This workshop is in response to growing needs in the field and new research programs such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier: Advancing Cognitive and Physical Capabilities (FW-HTF). In this episode of the Catalyzing Computing podcast, Khari Douglas sits down with workshop organizers Holly Rushmeier (Yale) and Beth Mynatt (Georgia Tech) to discuss […]

The following is a guest blog post by Beth Mynatt, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair and professor of Interactive Computing and the executive director of Georgia Tech‘s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).  The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Pioneers Project draws attention to HCI trail-blazers by describing their backgrounds and contributions. Ben Shneiderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, started the personal photo journal as a tribute to these individuals and as a celebration of their contributions to HCI. He hopes to make the pioneer’s projects more visible to a wider audience by featuring them on the website. Ben always had his camera with him at major conferences and […]