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As part of the ACM SIGCHI 2018 conference, INIT Lab director Lisa Anthony helped co-organize a ‘special interest group’ (SIG) session on child-computer interaction. This SIG is organized by some of the child-computer interaction research community every year. This year, the topic was “Ubiquity and Big Data“: how do we design technology for children in […]

On May 29, I completed and passed my PhD dissertation proposal defense. The proposal defense process can vary widely among institutions and even among departments in the same institution, so in this post I outline the process I followed in the CISE department at UF. The first step I followed was to create a document […]

I just completed my qualifying exam and in this blog post, I will detail what I think I learned from the qualifying exam (quals) process. In the CISE department at UF, the qualifying exam is the first milestone used to assess the student’s ability to successfully complete the Ph.D. program. This exam involves a literature […]

I am pleased to be able to say that I was recently honored with the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Faculty Advising/Mentor of the Year Award for 2017-2018. This award focuses on undergraduate research and mentoring, an activity which I prioritize heavily in my research lab and other activities as a professor at UF. […]

In the INIT Lab, we focus on natural user interaction for children. Many of these modalities, such as touch, gesture, and speech, involve some type of recognition process to understand what the user input is. To determine how accurate a recognizer is, there are several methods. One of these methods is using binary classifiers, as […]

Last spring, I participated in a project in a game design course. The project involved transforming a board game, previously designed by the University of Florida Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants, to a mobile game. The objective of the project was for children to learn about the effects of invasive species on their real-world […]

The main purpose of the Kids Application survey project is to help generate constructive recommendations for designing touchscreen interfaces specifically tailored towards kids. In our current study, we are taking inspiration by surveying interfaces of existing kid’s applications and are trying to decipher common interface/design patterns. We are presently in the process of creating categories […]

One of the main goals of the INIT Lab is to build more natural user interfaces for children. A source of inspiration for our work is looking at existing applications and interfaces and learning what works and what does not work for kids. We are currently working on creating a definitive list of which currently […]