News Archive

In June, former INIT Lab PhD student and TIDESS project member Nikita Soni (now a tenure-track assistant professor at UIC) presented our lessons learned in our TIDESS work related to interface design for interactive map-based datasets at a workshop on Map-based Interfaces and Interactions (MAPII) that was held virtually at the Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI)… Read more: TIDESS project lessons learned presented at AVI 2022 workshop! #laterpub #latertweet #tidess

INIT Lab undergraduate student Ailish Tierney has been a member of the lab and the TIDESS project since the Fall of 2019. Academic year 2021-2022 was her senior year and we are proud of her for getting accepted into the UF Undergraduate Scholars Program (USP), which provides undergraduates with a funded opportunity to work on… Read more: INIT Lab undergrad presents her TIDESS work at UF’s Undergraduate Research Day! #latertweet #tidess

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.… Read more: Two INIT Lab undergraduates complete successful senior theses! #latertweet

The INIT Lab has been collaborating with Dr. Kathryn M. Ross at UF in the Department of Clinical & Health Psychology on a clinical trial of an mHealth app for supporting weight loss and weight loss maintenance (for more, see our Project STAR and MyTrack+ project write-ups). During the COVID-19 pandemic, our research, like those… Read more: More on what we learned from conducting research during COVID-19, published in Obesity journal! #laterpub #latertweet

Former INIT Lab undergraduate research assistant Julia Woodward is first-author on a recent paper on her dissertation work that appeared at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’2022), held in person in New Orleans in May of 2022. For this paper, Julia brought together several threads from her previous research projects… Read more: INIT Lab undergrad alum Julia Woodward leads our most recent CHI publication! #laterpub #latertweet

The INIT Lab is supporting a new project, being funded by DARPA and led by Ruiz HCI Lab director and project PI Dr. Jaime Ruiz, on how to design more effective intelligent agents for real-time AR-based (augmented reality) task guidance. Our specific project focus is “ENKIx: Enabling Knowledgeable Task Guidance In the Extremes,” meaning, the… Read more: New collaborative project for the INIT Lab looking at the design of AR-based intelligent assistive agents! #latertweet

This past year, the TIDESS team was also able to publish some of our findings relevant to science learning for adults and children in the International Journal of Science Education: Part B: Communication and Public Outreach (IJSEB). Our paper is entitled “Inland adult and child interest in the ocean” and presents our insights from a… Read more: Another TIDESS project paper appears in a science ed journal! #laterpub #latertweet #tidess

The INIT Lab and TIDESS project are proud to announce that our work appeared at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in Fall of 2021! This paper reported our investigations into how groups of users (including both adults and children) arranged themselves physically and collaborated with each other while interacting with a multi-touch… Read more: TIDESS project paper on collaboration around multi-touch spherical displays published at CSCW 2021 (plus an Honorable Mention)! #laterpub #latertweet #tidess

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.… Read more: INIT Lab PhD student Nikita Soni successfully defends dissertation! #latertweet #tidess

In a previous tweet from 2020, INIT lab director Lisa Anthony shared the news that we were collaborating with UF Health researchers, including Dr. Mamoun Mardini from UF College of Medicine’s Department of Aging & Geriatric Research, to investigate the use of smartwatches and other wearables to detect problematic face-touching behaviors that could contribute to… Read more: INIT Lab collaboration on smart, wearables-based COVID-19 mitigation techniques leads to journal article in Sensors! #laterpub #latertweet