Category: Lab Announcements

In Spring of 2022, the INIT Lab had its first two undergraduate research assistants complete their senior theses! While we have had a long history of including undergraduates in our research, some of whom have led projects, first-authored papers, and gone on to graduate programs, these are our lab’s first official senior undergraduate honors theses. […]

Fall 2021 saw INIT Lab PhD student Nikita Soni successfully defending her dissertation work “Designing Interactions for Multi-touch Spherical Displays to Support Collaborative Learning in Museums” on October 14th! Defenses remained virtual this past year for safety and convenience during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nikita’s s committee members were myself (chair), Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune, Dr. […]

Recently, the INIT Lab learned that one of our collaborators, Dr. Danielle Jake-Schoffman, from UF’s College of Health and Human Performance (HHP) in the Department of Health Education & Behavior, has received an NIH-sponsored R21 grant called “FamilyFit: Promoting Family-Based Physical Activity and Weight Gain Prevention through Mobile Technology.” Dr. Jake-Schoffman directs the EXHale Lab, […]

I am excited to share that the our poster “Romadoro: Leveraging Nudge Techniques to Encourage Break-Taking” was accepted to the 34th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). In our poster, we present a Chrome plugin designed to encourage healthy break-taking through the implementation of technology-mediated nudges [1] coupled with the Pomodoro Technique […]

INIT Lab PhD student Aishat Aloba made us proud and defended her dissertation work “Tailoring Motion Recognition Systems to Children’s Motions” on June 18th! While we are emerging slowly from COVID-19 restrictions, the defense was held virtually for safety and convenience. Aishat’s committee members were myself (chair), Dr. Jaime Ruiz, Dr. Eakta Jain, and Dr. […]

The INIT Lab and Ruiz HCI lab at UF have a new NSF grant, in collaboration with Dr. Tempestt Neal and Dr. Shaun Canavan at USF, to pursue a project to understand users’ mental models of continuous (passive) authentication in smart environments, as well as to evaluate a proof-of-concept system with current sensing technologies. Continuous […]

In previous posts, we have discussed our ongoing work on the TIDESS project related to understanding how children and adults interact and learn from science data visualizations around large interactive surfaces.  For my dissertation work, my plan is to focus on understanding the Human-Computer Interaction questions related to how multi-generational groups collaborate and interact around […]

On April 22, 2020, I completed and passed my Ph.D. thesis proposal defense with the help and support of my thesis committee members. The main aim of my thesis proposal is to explore how to design gestural interaction techniques for multi-touch spherical displays to support collaborative learning among family groups in museums. As a part […]

Check out our remote video presentation for our CHI’2020 paper on the TIDESS website!

Today, the INIT Lab is proud to announce that PhD student Jeremiah Blanchard defended his dissertation work “Building Bridges: Dual-Modality Instruction and Introductory Programming Coursework” this afternoon! We held the defense virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions. Jeremiah’s committee members were myself (chair), Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune (co-chair), Dr. Joseph Wilson, Dr. Kristy Boyer, Dr. […]