Category: Understanding Gestures

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. […]

In 2020, the INIT Lab collaborated with the Ruiz HCI lab, in particular lead Ph.D. student author Julia Woodward, on a study to understand how well Fitts’ Law and FFitts’ Law applies to children’s touching behaviors on touchscreen devices. This study ended up being published in a paper entitled “Examining Fitts’ and FFitts’ Law Models […]

Dr. Alex Shaw graduated with his Ph.D. and moved on from the INIT Lab in Spring 2020. We are pleased to share that a survey paper Alex produced as part of his dissertation work has recently appeared in the Interacting with Computers journal, entitled “A Survey on Applying Automated Recognition of Touchscreen Stroke Gestures to […]

We are pleased to share that our paper “Examining the Link between Children’s Cognitive Development and Touchscreen Interaction Patterns” was accepted as a short paper to ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI). The INIT Lab and Ruiz HCI Lab have been collaborating with Dr. Pavlo Antonenko from the UF College of Education to investigate […]

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have been able to observe the process of running user studies with younger children and have started assisting in person with my teammates, Alex Shaw and Ziyang Chen. After observing the process of running the user studies and assisting my teammates in the user studies more than […]

The INIT lab is proud to share that PhD student Alex Shaw defended his dissertation work “Automatic Recognition of Children’s Touchscreen Stroke Gestures” earlier today! Due to the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, we held the defense virtually. Alex’s committee members were myself (chair), Dr. Jaime Ruiz, Dr. Eakta Jain, Dr. Damon Woodard, and Dr. Pavel Antonenko […]

Since my last post about our study, the Cognitive Development and Touchscreen Interaction project has gone through several rounds of study recruiting and running. We have recruited our participants from many interested local families with children aging between 4 to 7 years old. In the meantime, I have been working on some high-level analysis of […]

The cognitive development project, which is related to the Understanding Gestures project, is one of the projects in which I have been taking part since joining the INIT Lab. As introduced in the previous post,  the goal of the project is to investigate the relationship between children’s cognitive development and their interactions with touchscreens, and […]

Over the course of the last few weeks, I had my first experience of running a user study with younger children, particularly children age 6 to 7 from PK Yonge Blue Wave After School program. My PhD mentor, Alex Shaw, and I went through a week of recruitment and a week of study running at […]

Since I joined the INIT lab, I have been working on preparing a study related to the Understanding Gestures project. The goal of the project is to examine the relationship between previous findings about children’s touch and gesture interactions and their cognitive development. Our lab’s previous work has shown that children’s gestures are not recognized […]