We are welcoming our new CHI member Dr. Stephen MacNeil , who is starting his tenure track Assistant Professor appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences in Fall 2021. Stephen is joining us from the UCSD Design Lab, where he was a postdoctoral researcher. In his research, Stephen is building on theories from learning sciences, social computing, and human-computer interaction to democratize design and education by integrating the perspectives of non-experts.

Slobodan Vucetic and Jie Wu from Temple received a new collaborative NSF grant with their collaborators Shiwen Mao from Auburn and Xuyu Wang from California State at Sacramento for project “Data Augmentation and Adaptive Learning for Next Generation Wireless Spectrum Systems.” The primary goal of this project is to devise innovative approaches that enable wireless researchers and practitioners to acquire data more efficiently at reduced cost and to utilize existing data more effectively.

CHI professors Eduard Dragut and Slobodan Vucetic are co-organizing with Lucian Popa and Yunyao Li from IBM Research Almaden the 3rd Workshop on Data Science with Human in the Loop @ KDD 2021. The goal of this workshop is to stimulate research on human-computer cooperation challenges in data science. The workshop will focus on understanding how to leverage respective strengths of humans and computers along the data science pipeline and in a wide range of data science tasks and real-life applications.

CHI professors Eduard Dragut and Slobodan Vucetic are co-organizing with Lucian Popa and Yunyao Li from IBM Research Almaden the 2rd Workshop on Data Science with Human in the Loop @ NAACL 2021. The goal of this workshop is to stimulate research on understanding how to optimize human-computer cooperation and minimize human effort along the NLP pipeline in a wide range of NLP tasks and real-world applications.

Slobodan Vucetic, Eduard Dragut, Donald Hantula, and Matt Tincani from Temple are teaming up with Sungsoo Hong from George Mason on a new NSF grant “Personalized Virtual Job Assistants to Prepare Individuals with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities for Entry Level IT Jobs'. This project brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers with expertise in data science, software engineering, human-computer interaction, behavioral science, and special education, who will collaborate with vocational programs and employers to transform the current state of employment for young adults with mild to moderate neurodevelopmental disabilities.