A little about me...
Hi, there and thanks for dropping by! I am a Professor of Human Computer Interaction and I head the ODD (Organic Digital Domain) Research Group that looks at the intersection of how we, as organic creatures, interact with technologies that exist and grow at a scale and rate way beyond our innate capacity to handle. I also run the Future Educational Technologies Project from which our first project, ELF (Enhanced Lecture Flow) is looking for educators to join in the movement to improve the classroom connection between teachers and students.
I hail from Queens, New York, did my undergraduate degree in Physics and Computer Science at Cornell University and graduate studies at Brown University in Computer Science. Turning down a PhD scholarship to join MIT's Media Lab (partly because I felt uneasy about joining a project that had a vision of personalized news, which I thought would make people narrow minded...little did I foresee how it's now what everybody uses, including me!), I joined IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY, to combine my interest in visual art with computers and do research in visualization and interaction design.
I founded a tech startup in New York doing dynamic web annotation and ended up integrating the annotation feature into Amazon's Look Inside the Book feature. After founding and leading another tech startup -- this one in mobile education in Seattle -- I decided it was the ideation and creative process that I loved and decided to dedicate myself to research, completing my PhD under the Augmented Reality guru, Mark Billinghurst, at the University of Canterbury. My research established a quantitative relationship between the usability of AR navigation tools and the retention of cognitive maps. Outside of research, I enjoy playing music, (American) football, watching cartoons, the outdoors, and travelling.
My Courses
- IBE320 - eXtended Reality
- IBE405 - The Internet of Things and Smart Cities
My Research
My area of interest lies in the intersection between humans and computers, neatly packaged in the area of Human Computer Interaction. I try to understand, on a fundamental level through empirical qualitative and quantitative research methods, how human behavior should affect technology design and how technologies affect us as human beings. Many people have expressed concern about how technology can impact our innate abilities greatly and my research has focused on this area. For example, exploring the relationship between the ease-of-use of digital navigation tools and our natural ability to retain cognitive maps, I built augmented reality tools and analyzed empirical data to balance the utility of navigation tools with our dependency on them.
Switching from a cognitive to a social setting, I investigated how digital technology can distort our judgment of our ability to establish connections with others. I implemented an iPhone app for cooperative image capture to combine online collaboration with in-person interaction. This revealed perceptual discrepancies of our social comfort zones that I reconciled through user interface elements. In another project, I operationalized empathy for robot teammates by using the Unity game engine to build a gamified simulation of a space mining mission to study relationships within human-machine teams. Using a mixed method analysis, I found evidence that people may form strong attachment to high tech tools revealing how we interact with digital technologies in general, from the Internet of Things to autonomous vehicles.
Taken together, my research deals with the impact of emerging technologies on the users they serve as well as the relationship between people and technologies, which capture the research directions I plan to expand and extend upon. My work has been published in peer-reviewed venues of the ACM, IEEE, and APA (see publications list below). I have reviewed for numerous venues including ACM Computer Human Interaction, IEEE Human Robot Interaction, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. I have also helped organize several local and international conferences in the startup space and in the area of HCI including NordiCHI and CHINZ. I served two terms as council member and two terms as president of the New York Association of Phi Beta Kappa, which was founded in 1776 and is the oldest academic association in the United States. My duties included fund raising, donor relations, selection of scholarship recipient institutions, and managing over 3000 active members.