I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Rhode Island (URI). I direct the Accessible Socially Aware Technologies Group (ASSET) research group. My work is situated at the intersection of accessibility, human computer interaction, and machine learning applied to understand and meet the needs of marginalized populations. (https://kven.me)
The app my research group and I have been working on for a few years now is now out on Apple in the US! (Android will be soon.) It teaches adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities about abuse so they are empowered to protect themselves and others. We co-designed the app with members of this population and it is designed for them to use by themselves - including people who are nonverbal, etc. I was heavily involved in the design and development.
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How to scare researchers š» (h/t for the cartoon to @librarymistress )
Our paper ā'I... caught a person casing my house... and scared him off.ā: The Use of Security-focused Smart Home Devices by People with Disabilitiesā has received an Honorable Mention at #CHI2023! Awesome work by the team: Brittany Lewis, @pvnkscholar, Alex Gourley, Priyankan Kirupaharan!
@jbigham @andresmh @karger @Regan @axz I agree. Sometimes "old tech" is so much better. I am getting fed up with Slack these days, particularly, replying in thread in Slack is awful. Even after several years of use my mental model has not updated to deal with it. Especially when so many threads are updating at the same time.
@andresmh doesnāt seem to do anything in the default mastadon app, which would make sense. Itās weird that the option displays for oneās own toot.
Itās interesting that I can block or mute myself if I click on the three dots that appear on one of my old Toots. Temptedā¦. But not today! š
@andresmh I wish instead of being just a humble brag it would be informative to other as well!
I donāt get this recent trend of folks posting screenshots of (usually) Miro-based brainstorming sessions. These images are always lo-fi and the text on them cannot zoomed into and looked at. Why post at all, then? We donāt tolerate iamges with illegible text in our papers, should we tolerate them on social media? Maybe hci.social can make a rule. Alt text for all images and make all text in the posted images legible when zoomed in! Unless there is already a rule, in which case yay!
@andresmh twitter.com/wobbrockjo
@jbigham Then I hope 6 months is enough time for most of us to overcome the network effects of twitter. I wonder when the tipping point will be? In the meantime scrolling twitter and mastadon both is only making my smartphone addiction worse in the short term. I would like to think I am taking one for the team! š
@jbigham I agree. I like the place too. Musk needs to keep vacillating for a while so that we can get a whole bunch of HCI folks to move over. I wonder if that could be arranged! š§
@jbigham Now that Musk has been scared by our move, are we going to abandon Toots and move back to Twits?
@andresmh @jbigham @blair @Gillian @axz @msbernst If you are talking about CHI'21, then I think it was just the realization among the organizers that everyone was online and so within one conference mngt. system there was place for people to hang, see each other, and interact. Also session chairs were looking for questions from online participants (by necessity). A process was in place.
@andresmh @jbigham @blair @Gillian @axz @msbernst I agree. Last yearās fully virtual CHI was so much better for me than the hybrid CHI this year. Being new to the field and not knowing many people (and mostly during COVID) feeling included is nice. Last year felt much more inclusive and welcoming. More chances to talk to people. This year, in most of the sessions I attended, the virtual folks were just ignored. Pity, ācause I was so looking foward to it.
