Interface evaluation methods utilized in HCI are not exhaustive with respect to all possible configurations of a human-interactive system or all end user capabilities. New tools are needed to support rigorous usability analyses for safety-critical systems. To meet this need I employ formal methods, a set of mathematical tools and techniques for modeling and verifying systems, within a computational framework that enables HCI analysts to incorporate end user characteristics within formal models. Analyses employing the framework are exhaustive with respect to human-interactive system models, including discrete/continuous device elements and end users' psycho-motor capabilities.

This Ubicomp 2015 paper presents a model characterizing how people use personal tracking tools as a part of everyday life. My dissertation builds on the opportunities revealed in this model, including exploring designs for people who have lapsed in tracking and designing sharing features to facilitate greater audience interest and engagement.

Acceptance and adherence can affect the performance of therapeutic devices, which can have a direct impact on the medical outcomes of stroke survivors. This paper describes the examination of various design elements that may have an impact on the acceptance of home-use therapeutic devices, and the ongoing adherence patients have to following their prescribed exercises. We detail the creation of a proof-of-concept design for an interactive glove that allows the user to stimulate the fingertips of their affected hand by tapping the fingers of their unaffected hand, using Force Sensing Resistors to trigger Linear Resonance Actuators on the corresponding fingers. This paper outlines the design considerations and methods used to create the glove, and suggests a proposed study that will identify any significant interaction between common design elements of wearable therapeutic devices for home-use and the user's acceptance and adherence with the device.

I research how people produce and share information in crises. This 2016 article uses HCI research to speak to large-scale infrastructure issues. It is an account of how different sets of actors in the same crisis came to rely on somewhat different social and technical arrangements to address a common information need. Through two extended examples of coordinated information work in the same event, we gain a vantage point to see the interplay between different kinds of social arrangements (established media outlets and emergent crowd work) that filled important information gaps in a crisis. These collaborations, achieved similar ends while relying on different technical arrangements. Thus, they give us a vantage point to examine the interplay between different kinds of information and communication technologies (legacy ICTs and networked services such as social media) in a crisis context. Written for a federal policy audience, it highlights design considerations respective to ensuring the right infrastructures are in place to support the complexities of modern crisis communication.

Social media use is often negatively portrayed when it comes to youth and learning (e.g., a source of distraction). Using a mixed-method approach with 50 college students, I study the self-directed and interest-based learning that takes place via Facebook, such as developing political interests and bridging school-based learning to career opportunities.

When students work with peers they learn more actively, build richer knowledge structures, and connect material to their lives. Both online and on-land settings afford levers for system designers to build scalable and sustainable peer interactions; we investigate what these levers are and how to fine tune them.

Collaborative information analysis is critical in multiple domains. However, a huge gap exists between the complex task requirements and technology available. We present CAnalytics, a web application that connects analysts through multiple coordinated views and activity awareness features. We conducted a classroom study for evaluation. Results indicate that the tool increases collaboration closeness and task engagement.

This 2016 CHI paper explores the boundaries that parents set on young children's (age 1-5) use of digital media and children's experiences living within these limits. Understanding these practices is one component of my greater program of research which investigates: 1) the design choices that make digital interfaces accessible to young children, 2) the usage habits that are most conducive to healthy development, and 3) the larger family system in which young children's use of digital media is situated.

Medical crowdfunding provides a new opportunity for patients to solicit financial support from their social networks. Although variety forms of collective support from the patient's social networks signal legitimacy of the campaign, those are often invisible on campaign interfaces. We explore design challenges in making those signals more visible.

In my PhD, I explore sociotechnical issues that arise in the everyday lives of people interacting with and within pervasive computing environments. I focus on understanding how people create and revisit their memories, and how to design for collective interactions with shared family memory.

Despite the increasing accessibility of digital fabrication tools, negotiating the entire process from design to fabrication is still a complex challenge for new users. Through my research, I build and develop systems that help guide novices through different complexities that they face throughout the process.

Motion gestures can be expressive, fast to access and perform, and facilitated by ubiquitous inertial sensors. However, implementing a gesture recognizer requires substantial programming and pattern recognition expertise. Although several graphical desktop-based tools lower the threshold of development, they do not support ad hoc development in naturalistic settings. We present Mogeste, a mobile tool for in-situ motion gesture design. Mogeste allows interaction designers to envision, train, and test motion gesture recognizers using inertial sensors in commodity devices within minutes. Furthermore, it enables creative exploration by designers rapidly, at any time and within any context that inspires them. By supporting data collection, iterative design, and evaluation of envisioned gestural interactions within the context of its end-use, Mogeste reduces the gap between development and usage environments. With this tool, my hope is to empower interaction designers in their explorations of novel interfaces for emerging wearable and mobile platforms.

Sitting at the intersection of online community and cohorts arranged through university-provided education program, distance learners in distance education working towards a diploma need more than just materials-based delivery, but also demand and social integration as a supportive community in the face of challenges of online education, such as high dropout rates, stress from multiple roles as adults and feelings of isolation. My research focuses on enhancing visibility of distance learners to promote their sense of community through social presence to engage online learning actively and persistently.

I study people's perceptions and practices of today's collaborative writing using both behavioral data traces (what people do) and interviews (what people think). In addition, I have built an information visualization system to help researchers to understand collaborative writing and to support co-authors to write together better.

My research explores turn taking between young adult students with and without intellectual disabilities (ID). When students collaborated in integrated classrooms, I found misperceptions of ability and inequitable turn taking amongst these heterogeneous learners. I am exploring input devices and intelligent notifications as means to detect and mitigate this behavior.

Short-term intensive coding events, sometimes called hackathons, codefests, and sprints, are everywhere. Though popular, do they constitute a research-worthy area of their own? I outline several new research questions these events give rise to, provide some answers from my own work, and develop lines of inquiry for future research.

Given the power of imagery and the rise of image-sharing platforms, images are important in crisis informatics research. Analysis of images shared online during a disaster revealed differences in how local people versus the rest of the world visually represent the event, as well as competing expectations for such imagery.

As robotic partners become commonplace, we must adapt our robot models to match human expectations. Our ongoing work proposes an online, generalizable task-modeling technique to improve user experience. We plan to evaluate the utility and resulting user experience in a user study in which participants interact with a robot collaborator.

The meaning behind the word technology has shifted from the 'science of the arts' to 'applied science.' The focus on the result of design rather than the techniques of design has come to dominate discourse about technology itself. Are we examining the right subject when we research design?

I am interested in studying how people use social media to make sense of social expectations as their social roles change. In my recent work, I have studied how parents negotiate what to post online with their partners and extended family. I have also studied the use of social media by fathers, stay-at-home dads and parents of children with special needs. As social expectations of parents ' especially fathers ' change, social media provides a potential source of social support and interaction with others facing similar social challenges. In future work, I will focus on the use of pseudonymous and anonymous sites by parents as their social roles change.

Following major disasters, governments and other formal emergency responders conduct disaster impact assessments to guide relief and recovery efforts. The data gathered during such assessments is used to construct shared understandings of the disaster and the damage caused to affected areas. Yet such assessments are often reductive and disabling, in that they prioritize information needs of formal, bureaucratic response over informal, locally-driven community responses and they constrain portrayals of impact and loss only to what is measurable during a typically short window of time following a disaster event. This paper describes an ongoing research project that seeks to develop new techniques for assessing impact and conducting memory work in Nepal following the April 2015 Gorkha Earthquake.

I study self-disclosure and examine ways in which social computing systems can be designed to allow people to disclose stigmatized experiences and seek and provide support in their online social networks. My prior work has given me insight about online disclosures of mental illness and sexual abuse, the role of various degrees of anonymity in support seeking, and the ways that people respond to stigmatized disclosures. In my dissertation work, I focus on the miscarriage experience to investigate online disclosure and response practices around stigmatized topics, with the goal of improving both theory and social media design practices.

Social capital has the potential to benefit individuals and communities, but there remains a challenge in establishing exchanges in urban environments. My research aims to understand how to build social capital through sharing of physical goods and digital information between collocated people.

The central thesis of my dissertation is that situated gaze mechanisms can enable both virtual agents and social robots to more effectively communicate with human users across a variety of interaction contexts. My dissertation presents new understanding of several complex gaze mechanisms as they are utilized in human-human interactions, new models of gaze that connect low-level gaze variables with high-level social and cognitive processes, implementations of these models on both virtual and physical platforms, and evaluations of the effectiveness of these models across tasks with different measurable outcomes.

Certain video games are very effective at training spatial skills. We investigate specific features that determine a game's training effectiveness by developing our own game to isolate and test the effectiveness of different game features. In this paper, we describe results from our preliminary experiments and future research plans.

Princess Leia's 3D video-mail message in 'Star Wars' looked nothing like true holography, but it fired imaginations of what an interactive, digitally projected, and dimensional display could achieve. This STS and humanities project considers questions of visual communication and ontology in light of popular culture's fine-tuning of a new concept of holograms that technological development is now scrambling to actualize. If these efforts succeed ' if digital bodies begin occupying the same space as flesh bodies ' communication and even reality faces a possibly profound paradigm shift.

The average commute time in the US is close to 30 minutes each way. In a world where we wouldn't need to 'drive' the car while commuting, what would be the best use of this time? We see autonomous vehicles as an opportunity to help people reach wellness and high productivity levels. After all, commute time is not just moving from point A to point B. It is also about moving from a mindset to another. For example, from a family/relaxed mentality to a worker/productive mentality and vice-versa. We propose to use many sensors and multi-sensory feedback to personalize the in-car experience. We propose three types of interventions: in-car movement-based mindfulness, interactive chatbots and storytelling for drivers, immersive environments for users of autonomous vehicles leveraging virtual reality. We close with a discussion of the way to link values and mindsets to a 'healthy' commute.

Health researchers have explored and studied a wide range of strategies and interventions to promote physical activities, development of a more effective intervention to promote participation in regular physical activity remains an important challenge for researchers, clinicians, and health authorities.With the increase in the use of smartphones, personalization of health interventions can be done at a more real-time pace. Contextual features like weather, time of day, calendar, location and other features can be taken into consideration while intervening with the user. In this study, we conduct critical incident interviewing with individuals who are struggling to fit exercise into their lives to understand the in-the-moment factors that influence decision making. We delve deeper into some of the known perceived barriers to exercise and highlight the opportunities for leveraging context to overcome those barriers.

In this work, we use consumer-grade, off-the-shelf robots as a toolkit to provide tangible input and haptic output for desktop applications. We envision a software framework to integrate these 'GUI Robots' into existing applications, enabling several modes of tangible input and haptic feedback that can augment traditional user experiences.