Agile Research Studios
Undergraduate research experiences enhance learning and professional development, but providing effective and scalable research training is often limited by practical implementation and orchestration challenges. Agile Research Studios (ARS) is a new socio-technical model for expanding research training opportunities that supports research communities of practice without increasing faculty mentoring resources. ARS integrates and advances professional best practices and organizational designs, principles for forming effective learning communities, and design of social technologies to overcome the orchestration challenge of one faculty researcher mentoring 20 or more students. The DTR program uses the ARS model to improve the quality of learning, produce research outcomes, and lower the barrier to participation while increasing the number of students who receive authentic research training.
Agile Research Studio (Model)
Agile Research Studios is a new socio-technical model for research training consisting of processes, tools, and social structures for orchestrating...
Self-Directed Help Seeking and Skill Growth
Current work: Networked learning communities (NLCโs) are spaces designed for their members to collaborate on work and benefit from each otherโs...
Independent Development Plan
Independent Development Plan explores the effectiveness of metacognitive reflection in supporting students in building their self-direction skills by...
Nithya
As research groups expand in size, it becomes increasingly difficult for community members to identify the expertise within the community and the...
Pair Research
Pair Research is a platform that helps research studios pair students to help one another on their respective projects based on their reported task...
Polaris
It is increasingly important to train novice innovators in the skills they need to lead the design and research of solutions to todayโs most pressing...
Metacognitive Reflection
This project specifically examines how to support student-researchers in improving their metacognitive processes as they work on independently-lead...
Compass
Undergraduate research experiences provide numerous personal, professional, and societal benefits, including enhancing student learning and...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
- Matt Easterday
- Liz Gerber
Ph.D. Students
- ๐ย Leesha Maliakal Shah
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- ๐ย Neha Sharma
- ๐ย Aimee van den Berg
- ๐ย Ariella Silver
- ๐ย Bomani McClendon
- ๐ย Isaac Miller
- ๐ย Kevin Chen
- ๐ย Maggie Lou
- ๐ย Molly Pribble
- ๐ย Natalie Ghidali
- ๐ย Nneoma Oradiegwu
- ๐ย Olivia Gallager
- ๐ย Sameer Srivastava
- ๐ย Sehmon Burnam
- ๐ย Shankar Salwan
- ๐ย Victoria Cabales
- ๐ย Zev Stravitz
Breaking Boundaries
Breaking Boundaries focuses on exploring novel interactions and connecting people in unusual and unexpected ways. The goal of this SIG is to redefine the boundaries of what is possible in our everyday interactions and ways of doing. Example projects aim to empower interactions that (a) share real-world collective experiences as readily as we would share information via social media today; (b) provide personalized action plans for novice web developers as they embark on their first personal project; (c) allow developers to prototype mobile apps in low fidelity, but still test them outside of the lab in realistic scenarios; (d) blur the lines between physical and virtual reality; and (e) connects strangers through sharing of secret information about their community.
Big Talk
Developing an online question answering platform that promotes deeper, more meaningful interactions between people โ essentially skipping the small...
McGonagall
In this project we explore the use of mixed-fidelity (paper and digital) prototype design as a method for prototyping and testing mobile applications...
Rift Together
Rift Together explores interactions between two people โ one omniscient "brain" wearing the Oculus Rift and directing the other, who is in real life...
Secrets
Information sharing a core focus of many online systems, and within these systems information is shared either through established social ties and...
Action Plans for Personal Projects
Beginning and novice web developers often have trouble working through personal projects without the help of more experienced peers and mentors....
Remote Paper Prototype Testing
RPPT enables designers to wizard paper prototypes from afar while a user tests the prototype in realistic scenarios, out of the lab. The user tester...
Lake
Lake is an iOS app that allows designers to prototype mobile applications with complex functionality at low cost. By allowing designers to manipulate...
Yo Star
Yo* is a collective experience game based around forming shapes in real spaces. Players work collaboratively to form shapes on a map with their...
Enriching Creativity Support Tools with Art Pedagogy & Dialectical Engagement
This project aims to present speculative designs for Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) that incorporate learnings from art pedagogy, aiming to...
Prototyping with LLMs
As the popularity and usage of large language models (LLMs) have increased in recent years, developers have been leveraging this technology to...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
Ph.D. Students
- Maalvika Bhat
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- Arya Bulusu
- Jason Jewell
- ๐ย Alex Kaldjian
- ๐ย Alex Wang
- ๐ย Andrew Finke
- ๐ย Corey Grief
- ๐ย Greg Kim
- ๐ย Kalina Silverman
- ๐ย Katie George
- ๐ย Kevin Chen
- ๐ย Meg Grasse
- ๐ย Nikhil Pai
- ๐ย Ryan Madden
Context-Aware Metacognitive Practices
Learning how to program is hard, and many students in introductory computer science courses struggle to overcome programming challenges on their own. These students are unsatisfied with their performance on assignments, but donโt know how to identify ineffective actions in their process, reflect on the root causes for these actions (ex: impostor syndrome, low self-efficacy, low sense of belonging), or recognize potential obstacles. Without adopting solutions that address ineffective actions, their root causes, and obstacles, they will continue to struggle in CS.ย
Supporting Help-Seeking in CS1 Office Hours
Learning how to program is hard, and many students in introductory computer science courses (CS1) struggle to overcome programming challenges on...
Cardinal
Students studying computer science tend be ineffective planners who don't know the best practices for completing coding assignments and projects in...
PATH: Process Adjustment by Tackling Hang-ups
Learning how to program is hard, and many students in introductory computer science courses struggle to overcome programming challenges on their own;...
Q&A Buddy
Q&A Buddy explores the metacognitive skill of help-giving, and how we can best support TA/PMs in their job to give high-quality help to students...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
- Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke
Ph.D. Students
- ๐ย Harrison Kwik
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- Billy Kirchgessner
- Ella Cutler
- ๐ย Amy Guo
- ๐ย Dani Zhang
- ๐ย Iphigenie Bera
- ๐ย Izzy Chun
- ๐ย Justin Shi
- ๐ย Lauren Bichelmeir
- ๐ย Li Kang Tan
- ๐ย Spencer Arch Silverstein ("Archie")
Human-AI Tools
How can we imbue machines with a deeper understanding of human situations and contexts, and the interactions they afford? Despite significant advances in machine sensing and machine learning technologiesโand the availability of rich APIs for creating AI-powered applicationsโit remains difficult for designers to express their concept of a human situation (e.g., places to hold a private conversation; good places to take a bike ride with young children) to machines so that applications can be aware and responsive to the situation across a variety of distributed contexts. Failing to do so could result in costly errors, violate safety and privacy, or lead to inequitable access to AI supported experiences. To fill this gap, this SIG's projects advance new human-AI expression tools that support designers using their understanding of human situations to construct machine representations using available context features.ย
Human-AI tools for concept development and expression
Getting machines to support human experiences, desires, and goals requires imbuing them with representations of human situations that are beyond what...
Human-AI tools for accounting for differences across contexts
Addressing the challenge of context-aware computingโs failure to fully appreciate and adapt to the diverse geographical, social, and cultural...
Human-AI Tools for Accounting for Differences: Reference System
In the realm of life-changing technologies, understanding the impact of tools through context-aware computing is crucial to ensure systems are...
Human-AI Tools for Aligning to Machine Representations
Currently, there is no effective method of meaningfully aligning abstract human conceptions into a representation that can be understood and operated...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
Ph.D. Students
- None
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- JiaChen (Jackie) He
- Xinyue (Shirley) Zhang
- ๐ย Harita Duggirala
- ๐ย Jiayi Zheng
- ๐ย Jiho Kwak
- ๐ย Yiran Mo
- ๐ย Alex Feng
- ๐ย Mame Coumba Ka
- ๐ย Nuremir Babanov
- ๐ย Suhuai Chen
Networked Orchestration Technologies
Todayโs work and learning communities have become increasingly networked through the inclusion of a variety of social support structures, agile working processes, and productivity tools that facilitate their members in solving complex, ill-structured problems. While these advances are necessary for supporting complex work, learning how to connect oneโs working process with the support opportunities throughout the ecosystem can be challenging for novices since it requires them to continually monitor for their needs, plan strategies to resolve them, and replan as progress on their needs is made. Towards addressing these challenges, this SIG develops technologies that help people develop orchestration strategies for working and learning across the support opportunities present in these complex organizations.
Technologies for Networked Orchestration
Training undergraduates in conducting authentic, independent research provides many benefits to the student, including learning the regulation skills...
Regulation Devices
We are interested in exploring technologies that can help mentors and mentees more effectively regulate their behaviors in-the-moment to maximize the...
Interactive SOAP Notes
Networked learning communities in research settings provide students with many venues in which to help-seek or make research progress, but it is...
Orchestration Scripting Environments
Working well in networked communities requires that its members learn to access the support opportunities available for their needs, but this can be...
Understanding Networked Orchestration
Work and learning communities have become increasingly networked to support their members in developing the skills to solve complex, real-world...
Orchestration Scripting Platform
Mentors must be able to provide coaching to students when they are using ineffective network access strategies, but this remains difficult without...
Orchestrating Planning and Reflection
Todayโs problems across domains like research, engineering, and public policy are challenging, complex, and often ill-defined. In lieu of these...
Situated Reflection Systems
In the fast-paced realm of education, mentors and mentees grapple with identifying and addressing issues to improve work practices. Our project,...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
Ph.D. Students
- Kapil Garg
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- Grace Wang
- Linh Ly
- ๐ย Alex Feng
- ๐ย Ariella Silver
- ๐ย Caryl Henry
- ๐ย Charlotte Jones
- ๐ย Chase Duvall
- ๐ย Ella Jones
- ๐ย Hang Yin
- ๐ย Jason Friedman
- ๐ย Jonah Jodlowski
- ๐ย Josh Klein
- ๐ย Kieran Bondy
- ๐ย Mason Lin
- ๐ย Rawan Mohamed
- ๐ย Richard Huang
- ๐ย Sydney Smith
- ๐ย Tommy McHugh
- ๐ย Vishal Giridhar
Opportunistic Collective Experiences
Designing Opportunistic Interactions to Connect People at Distance
Affordance Aware Computing
We are exploring interactions, algorithms and architectures that will allow us to interact programmatically with objects in our physical environments...
Collective Experience API
Collective Experiences is a novel platform that coordinates people in real spaces in real time to participate in experiences. For example, if we...
OCE Design Guidelines
Opportunistic Collective Experiences (OCEs) are social experiences powered by computer programs that create shared, interactional spaces from...
Cast
The process of creating stories with others is highly engaging but labor-intensive, especially because satisfying narratives often require a central...
OCEs for Relationship Development
Screenshots of the Cerebro app that highlight the process in which users participate in shared activities while in a shared affordance.
Dedicating...
Intelligent Execution Engine
While opportunistic interactions are a promising way of promoting shared activities across space and time that fits into the routines of peopleโs...
Collective Narrative
With the emergence of social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, etc, sharing stories has become an essential part of peopleโs everyday...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
Ph.D. Students
- ๐ย Ryan Louie
- ๐ย Vsevolod (Seva) Suschevskiy
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- ๐ย Kevin Cheng
- ๐ย Pablo Gupta
- ๐ย Allison Sun
- ๐ย Amy Yang
- ๐ย Cindy Hu
- ๐ย David Lee
- ๐ย Eunice Lee
- ๐ย Gabriel Caniglia
- ๐ย Gino Wang
- ๐ย Grace Wainaina
- ๐ย Jennie Werner
- ๐ย Jenny Chang
- ๐ย Kevin Chen
- ๐ย Mary Truong
- ๐ย Mason Lin
- ๐ย Matthew Wang
- ๐ย Navin Gopaul
- ๐ย Nina Cong
- ๐ย Parveen Dhanoa
- ๐ย Richard Lam
- ๐ย Ryan Jeon
- ๐ย Ryan Madden
- ๐ย Sanfeng Wang
- ๐ย Shannon Nachreiner
- ๐ย Suzy Lee
- ๐ย Victoria Tran
- ๐ย Yvan Chu
- ๐ย Zachary Cmiel
Readily Available Learning Experiences
After completing programming courses, students encounter barriers when trying to contribute to open source and professional projects. Students may have the knowledge to develop an application, but knowledge gaps such as knowing which tool is the right tool to use can keep a student from applying their skills where a need exists. We propose research to bridge gaps in knowledge and overcome lack-of-experience barriers with a two-prong approach: Programming with a Purpose (PWAP) and Readily Available Learning Experiences (RALE). PWAP provides students with an opportunity to learn production-quality development practices while fulfilling the coding needs of actual clients. RALEs help students and professionals to overcome knowledge gaps that prevent them from developing high quality software products. Through participation in PWAP and RALEs, we hypothesize that students can gain tangible project experience and eliminate barriers to production-quality development.
Telescope
Professional websites contain rich interactive features that developers can learn from, yet understanding their implementation remains a challenge...
Scaffolded Exercises
Though options exist for learning web development skills independently, it is still difficult for intermediate web developers to learn to author...
GuideRALE
Online tutorial platforms with rich curation like Codecademy's โmake airbnbโ help learners acquire new programming techniques by offering them rich...
Knowledge Maps
Knowledge Maps encourages novice web developers to construct conceptual models by way of analyzing the code of professional web features. The...
TagStyle
Aspiring programmers have written millions of lines of code using online tutorial platforms such as Codeacademy, but none of this code will ever be...
Unravel
Professional websites with complex UI features provide real world examples for developers to learn from. Yet despite the availability of source code,...
Ply
Despite the ease of inspecting HTML and CSS, web developers struggle to identify the code most responsible for particular stylistic effects, due to...
rale-rnd
Novices struggle to understand professional web architectures ๐ฅ๏ธ. Professional sites can be good learning resources because they are inspectable ๐ง,...
RALE Modules
RQ1: Can highlighting and annotating design patterns help intermediate developers see how and why they are used in professional codebases?
RQ2: Can...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
- Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke
Ph.D. Students
- Gobi Dasu
- ๐ย Josh Hibschman
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- ๐ย Alexandra Andreiu
- ๐ย Aaron Leon
- ๐ย Alex Hollenbeck
- ๐ย Ava Robinson
- ๐ย Ben Rothman
- ๐ย Daniel Zhu
- ๐ย David Latimore
- ๐ย Fardeem Munir
- ๐ย Greg Kim
- ๐ย Jonathan Liu
- ๐ย Katie George
- ๐ย Lev Rosenberg
- ๐ย Maxine Whitely
- ๐ย Mieraf Mulat
- ๐ย Natalie Brewster
- ๐ย Philip House
- ๐ย Roxy Wilcox
- ๐ย Salome Kariuki
- ๐ย Sarah Lim
- ๐ย Suzy Lee
- ๐ย Yabi Ayele
On-the-Go Crowdsourcing
The On-the-Go Crowdsourcing SIG focuses on designing interactions, algorithms and architectures that conveniently leverage people's existing mobility and routines for crowdsourcing and self-sourcing. Projects center around three core areas: (1) enabling large-scale, high-fidelity communitysensing through lightweight interactions (see TapShare, Gaze, and Low-Effort Sensing); (2) empowering community-supported physical tasking through people's existing routines (see CrowdFound and Libero); (3) using location-aware reminders to promote completing tasks at home for oneself (see Micro-reminders). Our research aims to enable physical crowdsourcing systems to tap into the rich daily physical routines of over 100 million on-the-go Americans to better transport goods, map the world in exquisite new detail, and accomplish a broad range of tasks at scale. Our work will lead to a general framework and set of techniques that aim to achieve this by (1) scaffolding individual contributions toward a communal goal, (2) developing computational models and mechanisms that flexibly guide people to appropriate tasks and intelligently manage community participation.
MicroReminders
How can we use smart reminder systems to help people accomplish long-term personal goals, such as building habits? This project uses the idea of...
BiteNow
Current approaches to physical crowdsourcing focuses on one person contributing full reports for participatory sensing. These approaches focus on...
Opportunistic Hit-or-Wait
Figure: Illustration of the search distribution coverage across task delivery mechanisms for on-the-go crowds. Tall black bars denote wasted effort;...
Rahisi
Initial quarterly wrap-up video. Features the landmark opportunistic coffee delivery application, Caffeine Rush, which was created to explore what...
Understanding Task Notification Policies
Recent years have seen the growth of physical crowdsourcing systems (e.g., Uber; TaskRabbit) that motivate large numbers of people to provide new and...
Libero
Libero utilizes peopleโs existing routine for package delivery by incorporating just-in-time notifications in hopes of reducing task distance to an...
4X: Scaffolding Data Collection
Participatory sensing systems in which people actively participate in the data collection process must account for both the needs of data...
Social Tasking
On-the-go tasking systems, such as peer-to-peer food delivery or package delivery systems, help volunteers complete tasks for other users along their...
CrowdFound
CrowdFound, a mobile crowdsourcing system to find lost items. CrowdFound allows users to input lost item descriptions on a map and then sends...
Mercury
On-the-go physical crowdsourcing systems aim to take advantage of users' everyday routines to complete tasks for other community members. For...
TapShare
The pervasiveness of sensor-rich mobile devices enables citizens to contribute to sensing and data collection efforts by participating in citizen...
Gaze
Recent developments in citizen science, community sensing, and crowdsourcing suggest the possibilities of massive data collection about the natural...
Dynamic Habitsourcing
Building a habit is often a challenging task for many individuals. Our project, Dynamic Habit sourcing, investigates how dynamic habit sourcing...
Patterns
Natural Patterns uses an experience of recognizing, detecting, and reasoning about patterns in nature to promote a new form of citizen science -- one...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
Ph.D. Students
- Kapil Garg
- ๐ย Emily Harburg
- ๐ย Julian Vicens
- ๐ย Yongsung Kim
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- ๐ย Aaron Loh
- ๐ย Abizar Bagasrawala
- ๐ย Cooper Barth
- ๐ย Eli Cohen
- ๐ย Nicole Zhu
- ๐ย Olivia Barnett
- ๐ย Priya Shah
- ๐ย Sam Naser
- ๐ย Sasha Weiss
- ๐ย Shana Azria
- ๐ย Stephen Chan
- ๐ย Zak Allen
Playful Learning
The Playful Learning SIG focuses on designing, building, and evaluating playful learning environments that encourage people to interact with educational content in new and exciting ways. Projects center around three themes: (1) incorporating playful elements into learning activities to encourage exploration and deep understanding; (2) studying how peers can learn from each other through collaborative and competitive learning activities; and (3) understanding how learning transfers between playful learning activities and more traditional tasks. Our research will build a deeper understanding of how play can encourage and motivate learning, with the goal of producing general principals to guide the design of playful learning environments across multiple learning domains.
Bridges for Learning Transfer
While students may master a concept in one learning context, research shows that they often have trouble transferring that knowledge into a new...
Pyrus
Existing computer science programs do not emphasize the teaching of programming problem solving skills to novice programmers. However, programming...
Learning with Phones
Can you learn chemistry from your phone? Can it be fun? What are the components that allow learning or allow people to be
Assessments for Reflection
AFR aims to create a peer reviewing platform that allows students to receive actionable, timely, succinct and useful feedback in order to improve on...
Brain Points
Research has shown that rewarding or promoting a growth mindset in math has increased user engagement time, usersโ quality and quantity of problem...
Metacognitive Behavior Tracking
Research has shown that metacognition, or the process of thinking about thinking, helps people learn better. Metacognitive Behavior Tracking seeks to...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
- Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke
Ph.D. Students
- ๐ย Garrett Hedman
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- ๐ย Allison Lu
- ๐ย Ankita Chowdhry
- ๐ย Armaan Shah
- ๐ย Grace Alexander
- ๐ย Josh Shi
- ๐ย Lily Zhang
- ๐ย Megan Conlon
- ๐ย Morgan Walker
Situational Crowdsourcing
The Situational Crowdsourcing SIG focuses on designing, building, and testing technologies to use crowdsourcing and crowdsourced data to improve specific situations and routines through new forms of interaction. Projects center around three concepts: (1) habitsourcing, which is the idea of helping people develop personal habits through immersive experiences while leveraging habits as data collection opportunities; (2) physical games with a purpose, which creates new forms of affordance-aware physical gameplay that is powered by crowdsourced data and that collects additional data as a side-effect of physical interactions with objects in an environment; (3) spectator-sourcing, which engages live spectators at sporting events to provide tailored motivational support to athletes when they need it the most, and to help coaches understand trends in their players and during live games.
Zen Walk
The practice of meditation can benefit a personโs well-being through the development of a state of mindfulness and acceptance. ZenWalk is a guided...
ZombieRun Interactive
ZombieRun Interactive is a habitsourcing iPhone application that aims to leverage a userโs running habit to collect information about the world,...
Continual Support Systems
People in groups and communities are often willing, available, and able to support othersโ needs. For example, a graduate student in a research...
RinkTalk
Hockey coaches like to show their players game film in order to teach them important lessons about their play. The more players watch film of...
Habitsourcing
Millions of people around the world regularly develop and practice personal habits such as running and meditation. These practices reduce sedentary...
Physical Games with a Purpose
Humans have the innate ability to easily explore their surroundings. With sensor-rich mobile devices, everyday people can become data contributors by...
Team
Faculty
- Haoqi Zhang
Ph.D. Students
- ๐ย Leesha Maliakal Shah
- ๐ย Scott Cambo
- ๐ย Yongsung Kim
Masters and Undergraduate Students
- ๐ย Alaina Kafkes
- ๐ย Christina Kim
- ๐ย Frank Avino
- ๐ย Henry Spindell
- ๐ย Hyung-Soon Kim
- ๐ย Jennie Werner
- ๐ย Katherine Lin
- ๐ย Shawn Caeiro